Times change, and sometimes for the better. In 1982 Charlotte Ames, a University of Notre Dame librarian and subject specialist for Catholic Americana, compiled the first Directory of Roman Catholic Newspapers on Microfilm: United States, a guide to the holdings on this subject preserved in the Microtext Reading Room of Notre Dame's Hesburgh Library. In order to facilitate use, cross references and a title index were included; in some few cases an Online Computer Library Center number was provided. The directory, made available to users in a heat-bound booklet, contained 307 entries, listed by the state in which they were/are published. The sole annotation for each entry was a citation of the editions of the newspaper that were available in Memorial Library.

Fifteen or more years later you are reading this foreword either on your computer (or from a printout) via the World Wide Web or another online service, or in the more conventional printed format. This second edition is slightly retitled to reflect more accurately the contents. Thus we present Catholic Newspapers in Microform: A Directory of Works at Notre Dame. In this new edition, the number of entries has grown to 373, and the significantly more detailed annotations include place and dates of publication, publication history, frequency, call number, and holdings information. The titles are arranged alphabetically rather than by state, to correspond to the cataloging record of each work as it appears in UNLOC, the University of Notre Dame Libraries' Online catalog.

Happily, three important ingredients have not changed. Given their impressive number, scope, and historical range, Catholic newspapers continue to be one of the invaluable primary sources for the recovery of the American as well as the Catholic American past; and Notre Dame remains fortunate enough to offer researchers the use of one of the most comprehensive collections of Roman Catholic newspapers in the United States. Second, the publisher of this directory, the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism, in its infancy in 1982, has grown with the times and found new ways (including multi-media and multi-formatting) to promote the scholarly study of the American Catholic community. In addition to its newsletter, seminars, conferences, research projects, two book publication series, research grants and fellowships, the Cushwa Center now provides information on American Catholic studies via its own home page on the World Wide Web (http://www.nd.edu:80/~cushwa/).

Third, and most important for successful preparation of this updated resource, Charlotte Ames continues to devote her considerable skill and energies to the demanding work of keeping abreast of the latest technological improvements and opportunities in information processing. She does so in order to provide the most complete and user-friendly scholarly resources to historians, sociologists, political scientists, and other scholars interested in American Catholicism. This new and improved directory is an excellent case in point, and I hope that researchers will find it to be a most useful introduction to the Notre Dame collection of Catholic newspapers in microform.

R. Scott Appleby
Director, Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism