If you or a family member attended Virginia Western Community College in its early years, and between moves and household purges can’t put your hands on that yearbook or clippings from the student-run campus newspaper you had been holding onto, you’re in luck. Yearbooks, newspapers and catalogs from throughout the College’s nearly 60-year history have been digitized and are now available to search, view and share. You can search the collection by title, name, year or building.

As part of a collaborative project with the Library of Virginia in Richmond, the College was able to digitize the collection that the campus library had archived through the years. The Virginia Newspaper Program locates, inventories and preserves newspapers housed in Virginia libraries, including colleges, and there’s no cost for the individual libraries. A team from the Newspaper Program picked up the boxes full of Virginia Western print publications, including 135 newspapers, in May 2024, and the full collection was online in February 2025. The print materials have been returned to the campus library so the community can continue to access them there, or from anywhere with the new digital collection.

Read more about the archive in this story by Karenna Glover for Impact magazine.