ProQuest Historical Annual Reports

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ProQuest Historical Annual Reports (HAR) 1844-

We are pleased to announce that the Western Libraries has purchased the massive digital archive of corporate annual reports offered by ProQuest. The collection includes the annual reports of most of the major corporations in the United States over a long period of time – roughly from the mid-19th century to the present. It contains over 40,000 reports that have been scanned from cover-to-cover and which are searchable using the familiar ProQuest platform. Given the importance and influence of business and corporations this collection also will be useful for economists, sociologists, and historians, including social ones and cliometricians.
Prior to the introduction of EDGAR (the Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis and Retrieval system) in the mid-1990s, corporate reports were typically only available in print and they were often scattered geographically in company archives and found in the odd university collection. They are now all aggregated here for you and they are fully searchable using a variety of methods. As well, ProQuest offers enhanced indexing and that indexing along with the full-text searching capabilities means that the possibilities for mining this collection are limited only by your imagination.
The value of this collection is increased because it is cross-searchable with related ProQuest databases - namely their historical newspaper collections - which the Western Libraries has also purchased. This means that when you are investigating a company or issue in any given year, you will be able to search for related news stories about the company or subject. The following newspapers are available: The New York Times (1851-2004); The Wall Street Journal, (1889-1990); Washington Post (1877-1991); Christian Science Monitor (1908-1994); Los Angeles Times (1881-1986); Chicago Tribune ( 1849-1986); Atlanta Constitution (1868-1939); The Boston Globe (1872-1924); The Hartford Courant (1764-1984) and the Chicago Defender (1909-1975).

We provide below some sample searches and some sample contents from our own searches of the database. ProQuest offers some very useful descriptions and we recommend you look at these:

HAR brochure: http://www.proquest.com/products_pq/literature/proquest/HARbrochure.pdf
HAR demo: http://www.proquest.com/products_pq/interactive/demos/historical_annual_reports/page1.html
Sample AT&T report from 1930; http://www.proquest.com/products_pq/literature/proquest/att1930.pdf

For more details about the collection feel free to contact the C.B. “Bud” Johnston Library.

For related annual report collections in the Johnston Library see this page: http://www.lib.uwo.ca/business/companyinfo.html
For information about the subject of "Annual Reports" see our guide - The Corporate Annual Report: A Bibliography

Presented below are some search results and samples.

Searching by year you learn from the Western Airlines report of 1929 that “Airplane passenger operations throughout the country sustained losses during 1929. In this regard your company was perhaps less seriously affected than any other. The volume of passenger traffic and passenger revenues on Western Air Express lines increased nearly four-fold over the proceeding year.” [use care when you search – this company shows up under both Western Airlines and Western Air Lines]

Or if you look for crashes relating to airplanes you will find:
"In the Continental Airlines report for 1979 that:” In June and July, the airline industry was crippled by the grounding of the nation’s DC-10 fleets by the Federal Aviation Administration for an exhaustive investigation brought about by the crash of an American Airlines DC-10 in Chicago”.

When you search for “Dough boy” you find the Pillsbury Company Annual Report for 1969 and learn among other things:
that the company is just completing its first century and is ranked 189 on the Fortune 500. Also:

that Pillsbury recognized in 1969 the importance of CSR (Corporate Social Responsibilty) – “Another aspect of our business that we want to comment on is that of social responsibilities. We feel that our stockholders should know that we keenly recognize the need for a corporate citizenship role”.
“that Poppin’ Fresh, our well-known dough boy, is a remarkable device for effectively communicating with almost every consumer, and consequently we have broadened his use as a spokesman, for the consumer product area.”
that “Consumerism has continued to grow as a national issue….Recently questions have been raised about the nutritional soundness of Americans’ eating habits.”
that during the year Burger King opened 123 units, bringing our operating total to 489
that internationally Pillsbury had 22 investments in 15 countries

From the Anheuser-Busch report of 1950 you learn that what was true then is still true now, - “Budweiser there’s nothing like it…absolutely nothing”.
It was in that year as well that the “company assumed entire[sic]cost of group insurance and welfare benefits for all employees; heretofore this cost was shared by company and employees.”
It is also noted that of their 8,383 shareholders, 2670 are women.

Students of entertainment and pop culture will learn many things from looking at the CBS Annual Report for that year (1950) including:
- the attempt to introduce color television (even though the Korean War had begun): “Your companies 10-year effort to bring color television to the public came to a climax when the Federal Communications Commission adopted the CBS color system as standard for the industry. Our plans for commercial color broadcasting had to be suspended, however, because of a series of legal actions, and they have been further complicated by the current national emergency.”
- on television Steve Allen, Jack Benny, Edger Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, Burns and Allen, Gary Moore, Ken Murray, Frank Sinatra all made their debuts.
- Jack Benny was named the “greatest radio personality of the last 25 years”
- and in sports “During the football season an interesting experiment brought much favorable comment. Complete films of a Saturday game were developed on Saturday night, edited and scripted Sunday morning and shown early Sunday afternoon. Through advance screening it was possible for Sports Director Red Barber to point out certain key plays and developments, alerting the audience for these highlights”.

Doing an AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) search (which is a little tricky to do) you find in the Bristol-Myers Annual Report for 1987 that: “The company’s role in the fight to treat and control AIDS is becoming increasingly important. In November, the company announced U.S. Food and Drug Administration clearance to begin testing in humans the AIDS vaccine developed by our Oncogen subsidiary.”