The passage of time can cause a digital divide and an educational barrier, especially for students trying to transfer their pre-2015 credits from Virginia Western Community College on to other institutions.
When applying for transfer credit at other schools, students need to provide the course descriptions from the annual college catalogs for evaluation. Recent Virginia Western graduates can find their course descriptions online, but alums who graduated before 2015 have often asked Brown Library to search the archives and provide digital scans of the needed pages.
“The library was getting maybe 10 calls a month from alums needing access to the archives and help finding old paper course catalogs for anything prior to 2015,” explains Dale Dulaney, open educational resources and collections librarian.
The situation also helped put a spotlight on an unlikely slice of Virginia Western history, thanks to the patient work of Clair Spencer, library assistant, scanning paper records. Brown Library, which manages the college archive, recently completed the project of digitizing 47 print catalogs that date back to the late 1960s. In all, 7,876 scanned pages are now available on the library website to complement the more recent, born-digital catalogs.
“As we went along, I began to see that these mundane catalogs contained quite a bit of college history as well. Many of the covers, especially from the early years, were printed in glorious colors,” Dulaney says. “It looks like many of our graphic design and photography students were inspired by Andy Warhol and psychodelia.”
Catalogs list programs that have come and gone, such as Radio and Television Production Technology and the Stenographic program. Photographs of students, faculty, and the campus are contained throughout most catalogs. In the first catalogs from 1967 through 1970, the college acknowledges an ongoing challenge with the disclaimer, “Until further development of the campus, parking will be a problem.”
The college archive is a non-circulating collection of items from the college’s founding until now. Dulaney and the team at Brown Library continue to collect, organize and preserve objects that tell the story of Virginia Western.
“My favorite thing in the archive right now is a class ring, because rings were only made for the first few years. We don’t even know exactly what year it’s from. We think it’s very rare. We also have a nurse’s cap given to the alum during her graduation ceremony. That’s from one of the first cohort years.”
Brown Library staff are always on the lookout for other worthy objects or records that help to tell the story of Virginia Western. If something is of particular interest, Dulaney will set a “watch alert” on eBay to receive notice in case suitable items become available.
“We’re especially hoping someone has pennants to donate to the archives, but I’m also watching for shirts or clothing with logos, maybe jackets. We also need more of the pins given out during graduation pinning ceremonies through different eras. Those would really take our collection to the next level.”
If you or anyone you know has items relating to Virginia Western and would like to donate them, please contact the library at library@virginiawestern.edu or (540) 857-7303.
