The Joyce Sports Research Collection, Department of Special Collections, University of Notre Dame Hesburgh Libraries, is one of the largest accumulations of sports-related print and manuscript matter in the world, supporting research into the history, sociology, and economics of American sports and their antecedents abroad.
Related subject areas supported by the collection include health and exercise, sporting activities and the outdoors, sports literature and journalism, games, and many more topics. The most prevalent formats are books, periodicals, printed ephemera, printed illustrations and photographs, and manuscripts.
The Joyce Sports Research Collection's rare book component, numbering upwards of 3,000 monographs, includes many of the field's scarce and foundational titles. The earliest imprints demonstrate the rise of a sports-related literature in Early Modern Europe. Those of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are primarily British, while later books are in the main American (though many British imprints will still be found). Baseball, American football, ice hockey, boxing, billiards, and golf are among the subject areas especially well represented in the book collections . Thousands of periodical titles range from the earliest of all sports journals (the Sporting Magazine, published in London from 1792 to 1871) to modern 20th- and 21st-century sporting titles from the United States and other countries. These periodicals include not just magazines and newspapers but guide format annual publications, including a particularly rich assemblage of the hundreds of Spalding Athletic Library titles published between the 1870s and 1940.
One of the important strengths of the Joyce Sports Research Collection is the tens of thousands of pieces of printed ephemera—record books, rulebooks, media guides, yearbooks, programs, scorecards, catalogs, sheet music, broadsides, and the like documenting all manner of sports, athletics, and recreational activities. In addition to commercial publications, many of these items were published by colleges and universities, or by franchises in the professional sports leagues that flourished in the U.S. starting in the later nineteenth century. There are, for example, more than 18,000 college football game programs predating 1970, and more than 3,500 professional football programs from the same era.
The Joyce Sports Research Collection also contains more than 500 linear feet of non-printed matter. The manuscript and archival portions of the collection are particularly strong in boxing, football, wrestling, and baseball. Among the more substantial manuscript groups are the Jack Pfefer Wrestling Collection; the Nat Fleischer Papers; the Gene Tunney Papers; the Red Smith Collection; the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League Collection; and the Fred L. Steers Papers. Two important pictorial resources are the Michael Oriard Collection of Football Illustration and the Harry E. Winkler Collection of Boxing Photographs.
The Joyce Sports Research Collection has been actively collecting since the mid-1960s, the product of dozens of important donations as well as purchases large and small. A significant portion of the present collection was culled from the 1975 purchase of the inventory of Goodwin Goldfaden, a well-known Los Angeles-based sports publications and rare book dealer. The collection was endowed by the university in 1987, in honor of Rev. Edmund P. Joyce, C.S.C., Notre Dame's longtime executive vice president.
Books, periodicals, posters, and other material in the Joyce Collection may be searched in the ND Catalog. Patrons wishing to limit a search to items in RBSC may limit their search to "Rare Books and Special Collections" in the "ND Catalog" search option.
Researchers interested in baseball, basketball, boxing, American football, ice hockey, or wrestling may consult the resource guides that have been compiled for each of these subject areas by navigating to the tabs on the left-hand side of this page. These guides provide finding aids to some kinds of materials—especially printed ephemera like media guides, yearbooks, and programs.
Finally, researchers interested specifically in sports-related manuscript collections (hand- and typewritten texts, scrapbooks, photographs, and other archival formats) may consult the Joyce Sports Research Collection Manuscript Guide or search the Hesburgh Libraries instance of ArchivesSpace.
In addition, patrons are invited to visit the digital exhibits listed below featuring material from the Joyce Sports Research Collection.