This past semester, the archives has been very busy. We have a few ongoing projects, some new collections in the works, and a few updates. First, some ongoing projects…
Bicentennial Oral History Project
The Bicentennial Oral History Project is still happening! Oral History Assistant Ashley Clayton started with us this past August, contacting alumni and conducting interviews. This semester, Ashley interviewed 14 alumni, staff, and even a few faculty members, such as retired nursing professor Jane Vincent and current Associate Vice Chancellor of Academic Affairs T.J. Rivard. We also have online student Jennifer Haught, who started in October as our second Oral History Assistant, and she has been helping us with transcribing our interviews. So far, Jennifer has transcribed 13 interviews and continues to work at a fast pace. Both students have been invaluable to the Bicentennial Oral History Project on the IU East Campus and will be continuing to work on this project this coming spring semester. If you are an IU alumni or retired staff or faculty, we would love to hear your story. Please contact us at https://200.iu.edu/signature-projects/oral-history/form.html if you wish to participate.
IU East Campus History Course
This fall, the IU East Campus History Course went live on Expand IU at https://expand.iu.edu/browse/iuheritage/courses/iuehistory. It is a free, self-paced course about the history and development of the IU East Campus. The course contains fun activities and short quizzes to help you learn the content and, of course, provides access to oral histories via the Faculty module and you can look thru many of the older student writing journals and course bulletins. Library student worker Brittany Yoder has been working hard at adding more content to the Faculty book in our Faculty module, adding pictures and information on past and current faculty members, and we continue to add more digitized content to the course modules as it becomes available. Speaking of digitization leads us to our next ongoing project…
Digitizing Course Bulletins
We have a select number of years digitized and uploaded into the IU East Campus History Course, but we are currently working on digitizing all the course bulletins that are not already available online. Course bulletins are also known as course schedules or class listings. They are very interesting to look at to see what kind of courses IU East used to offer. We are also planning on digitizing more of the early student writing journals. These items will be accessible via the course but also via the Archives libguide at https://iue.libguides.com/iuearchives/bulletins. Check the site often as more is added each week.
Collections in the Works
We have a few collections that are in the works. Library student staff worker Dakota Firsich is currently working on creating an in depth finding aid for the Faculty Senate Collection, listing the minute dates and the attendees. This is a large collection and Dakota is working diligently to make the content of the finding aid more informative and accessible for our patrons interested in this collection.
We also have two new collections donated to the archives, one from retired nursing faculty Jane Vincent, who provided us copies of news articles, letters, and a gift of appreciation given to her by her students, and the other from the late George Blakey. George Blakey’s family has been kind enough to donate several of George’s teaching awards, his Chancellor’s medallion, and several family photos. These items were on display at his memorial service and will soon be processed and carefully stored within the archives.
Even though the archives is busy with multiple projects, we are always happy to receive donations or work with anyone interested in viewing any of our collections. If you are a student, staff, or faculty member and you have material that you think should be saved in the archives, you can check out our collection development policy at https://iue.libguides.com/iuearchives/mission for a list of what we collect. If you want to see what collections we have, you can view our finding aids at https://iue.libguides.com/iuearchives/collections. As always you can also contact archivist Beth South with any questions about the collections or any of the projects mentioned above at eabrockm@iue.edu.