I Love Archives Questions
For all the fact that I’m a tech geek, my favorite reference questions are those about materials in our archives. I guess this is because I love history. Today, I was helping someone work on geneology for their family. A relative was a SUNY Cortland (then Cortland Normal School) graduate of 1915. So I went digging through our archives for information. The yearbooks don’t go back that far but the student newspaper does (it actually goes back to before 1900) and at that time there was an issue called the “Senior Annual” which had information on members of the graduating class. It was so neat to look at the photos and read a little bit about the people from that time. One thing that threw me for a loop was that not all the photos have captions. Some do some don’t. Ironically, the photos of the male fraternities seem to include a caption of who is in the photo but the female fraternities don’t. Argh! I can’t tell the nice gentleman if his relative is the photo or not. She might be since she was a member but without a caption I just don’t know. I love this material and am really excited about the fact that the library director wants me to investigate the possibility of digitizing it. This would be a great project, not just because of the fact that it is something new for me to work on, but also because these items are an important part of the college’s history that is crumbling away. I’m looking forward to the challenge that it will present and how that I can do some of the process myself so I can look at all the neat stuff!