Brother Aidan's Extracts were compiled by the first Archivist of the United States Province of the Brothers of the Holy Cross, Brother Aidan O'Reilly, C.S.C. The work was done in 1946 and 1947 and was nearly finished at his death in 1948. The first set of notes was typed by the Scholastic Brothers at Dujarie Institute, but the present three volume set-up provides a slightly edited and more compactly typed edition done by the Archives Department in 1949 and 1950. The letter was done under the direction of Brother Garnier Morin, C.S.C., archivist from 1948 to 1950.

At the time of the erection of the autonomous provinces in the Congregation of Holy Cross, the newly constituted Brothers' Province had no archives. The whole idea of the Extracts was to gather excerpts about Brothers from any Community source, especially the provincial office, which was automatically taken over by the priests of the Indiana Province. The material thus obtained would provide for the daily needs or even the long range needs of the young province. Sources include some of the letters and the visitors' reports which are on file at the Priests Provinciliate, and also any old journals available at that time. Other sources include the Scholastic , Sorin Chronicles , and publications by members.

This work was done during the administration of the first Provincial Superior of the Brothers' Province, Brother Ephrem O'Dwyer, C.S.C., and has his approval.

Note on the World Wide Web Edition : Brother Aidan's Extracts have been transcribed more than once by a number of volunteers, some of them Brothers, some of them workers in the Archives of the University of Notre Dame. In the Archives, we have often used our photocopies of one of the typewritten versions of the Extracts to help answer reference questions about the history of the university. We originally asked one of our student workers, who had good typing skills, to put the Extracts into machine-readable form so that we would have a more convenient way of searching the text. It has taken many years, and the work of a good many people, to achieve this modest goal. Since so many people have worked on it, many inconsistencies and variations have crept in. We certainly do not regard this as a scholarly edition of Brother Aidan's Extracts; if we were to produce such an edition, we would have no guarantee that the Extracts, recorded with all their variations, would perfectly represent the texts from which they were extracted. From the beginning the purpose was to provide a convenience for those trying to locate material of interest; this web edition should be regarded in the same light, as a finding aid to the original sources it quotes rather than as a source in itself to be quoted by scholars.