On February 12 Oesterle Library hosted a party celebrating Abraham Lincoln's 200th birthday. The turnout was amazing and it received great local media coverage. While the majority of the items on display in the Archives Reference Room were from the special collections collection that Emily, our technical services coordinator oversees, I did find a few cool items in the College's Archives to add to the display. This was one of the items I pulled out.

One of the sons of the first president enlisted in an Ohio regiment and fought for the Union Army during the Civil War. He died of fever following the siege at Vicksburg in 1863. We have his diaries as well as some letters. This is one of the letters sent back to his family. I liked it particularly because of the stationery which says "But one flag from Ocean to Ocean."

The letter and diaries are part of our Smith Family Papers collection.

Other new stuff in the Archives

In addition to the digitization of the Chronicle, a few other projects have finally been or are close to completed. After quite some time, the topical files from the Office of Public Information have been processed (meaning weeded of duplicates/extraneous materials; placed in acid free folders and boxes; container list typed up; and labels put on boxes).

Another project that's coming up on completion is an in-house digitization project. In Merner Fieldhouse, the Athletic department over the years have hung photographs of individual and relay team CCIW champions, all-Americans, and National Champions. We've been working with Athletics and maintenance staff down there to get those scanned. We've scanned at archival resolution and format and are close to having these finished (560 with approximately another 50 remaining). This photo is of the 1996 4x400 women's relay team.

Additional materials received that are currently in process include the financial records of the College from 1860s through approximately 1950 (when they went machine readable) and the records of the Dean of Faculty from about 1960 through the early 1990s. More about these files as we get them prepared for researchers.

post-holidays update

Well, it's been a while now, hasn't it?? Vacation around Thanksgiving and then December general craziness. But, now the students are back and things are settling into a busy term. The biggest deal occurrence for the Archives this winter break was the digitization of the student newspaper. This is a project I really never expected to see happen, but it did! Planning for the College's 150th anniversary is happening now and the coordinator for the celebration saw the Chronicle digitization project as a crucial part of the preparations for the celebration of our long history.

We selected ArcaSearch as our vendor for this project for a variety of reasons and I cannot be happier with the job they did. It's an unbelievably useful resource for me and I anticipate many researchers using it in the future. For the first time ever, the student newspaper is keyword searchable (no index had existed previously) and it's available whenever, wherever with computer access. I'm still trying to figure out how to really get the word out there, but tomorrow I meet with the Capstone History class (our original research/historiography class for majors). If you're interested in taking a look, just head to https://www.arcasearch.com/us/nc/

I'll update in the next little while with other events & new accessions that happened this December.