By Karenna Glover
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.
Dale Dulaney, open educational resources and collections librarian at Virginia Western, oversaw the project with support from library assistant Clair Spencer. Digitizing the materials that have been archived in the library makes them more accessible, and also preserves them.
“It’s wonderful that we had all of these resources, but they were just sitting in archivable boxes, and very few people knew they were there, and the pages were so fragile, it was easy to unintentionally compromise them,” Dulaney said.
If you want to see what classes and degrees were offered in the early years of the College or any year since, the collection includes all College catalogs since 1967. Only two yearbooks were ever published at the College, in 1969 and 1970, but both issues are available.
The most significant, but equally sporadic collection, is of the college’s student newspaper. First published in January 1967, the newspaper was named the Communi-Cator. The first issue was a mimeograph with a hand-drawn masthead, and the main story was a feature of Dr. Thomas E. Jenkins, who was the administrative assistant to the College’s president, Dr. Travis McKenzie. That was the only issue published that inaugural year. The lag between publications likely reflects the time to get sponsors and student writers, according to Dulaney.
The following year, the Communi-Cator published twice a month during the fall and spring semesters and carried a more traditional newspaper format. Only two editions have emerged for 1969, but it’s possible other editions were published that year, and the records weren’t maintained. In total, there are 95 issues of the Communi-Cator, which continued to publish through 1981.
In 1984, the paper started back up with a new name, VWCC Gazette, which published 29 issues over five years. In May 1989, the paper was renamed the Virginia Western Folio, which lasted through 1993. Ten of those issues are digitized. Later, the paper was renamed Virginia Western Voice, but only one issue was published.
Now, anyone with an interest in Virginia Western can browse the digital records and learn about its place in history and its evolution over the years. For example, you can see how buildings on campus have changed over time, and even the history of certain major campus structures, like the walkway, from the proposal to the drawing to what it is today. That timeline and process is captured in these archives.
“You see how the use of buildings has changed over time, and how student concerns are the same, from cramming for exams to the bustling active life of the campus,” said Dulaney. “A lot of that stuff gets lost over time as students leave and people retire. These newspapers are a snapshot of that.”
(This story was published in the Winter 2026 edition of Impact magazine, a publication of the Virginia Western Community College Educational Foundation.)
