Author Archives: kgmatheny

Campus Rewind: The President’s Mansion

For this installment of Campus Rewind, check out these photos of the President’s Mansion, recently added to HistoryPin. Besides the building, you’ll see a former President, a then-current First Lady, students protesting, and students horsing around, antebellum costume (in the 1960s!), and some truly … Continue reading

Searching Acumen – Using Tabs to Limit by Format

[Update, 8/25/14: The look of our digital repository has changed. The functionality discussed below is still very much there — in a new form. To limit to format now, use the dropdown menu at the search bar.] In the first of … Continue reading

April 15, 1865 – A Tale of Two Cities

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.  Englishman Charles Dickens wrote that in 1859, just two years before England’s former colonies began a long and bloody civil war. I wonder if that quote came to … Continue reading

Family Connections

With a collection as regional as the one at the W. S. Hoole Special Collections Library, it’s not surprising to find some occasional overlap. The Wynne Family Papers and the Meriwether Family Papers come together with the Coleman family, as you can see … Continue reading

The Day the Campus Burned

Five days later, and it might not have happened at all. Five days later, Robert E. Lee was surrendering at Appomattox Courthouse, and the Civil War was irreversibly moving toward its end. Five days later, Brigadier General John T. Croxton … Continue reading

Surplus?

Recently, the kind folks at the Annex said enough was enough — we needed to get our boxes of extra equipment out of their storage space. Rather than let the boxes sit around here and collect dust, we decided to … Continue reading

Newly online: materials about slave labor at UA, 1820s-1860s

We know them by first name only, and there’s a good chance those are not the names they were born with. Men called William, Moses, Edwards, Patrick, Sam, Major, Quillen, Arthur, Speers, Robert, Andrew, Swindle, Peter, Erasmus, Anderson, Jack, Isaac, … Continue reading

1870s English Literature lecture notebook

Philology, n. the study of literary texts and of written records; linguistics, especially historical and comparative linguistics; Obsolete: the love of learning and literature. Long before literature students spent their time looking for symbolism and theme in poems and stories, … Continue reading

More adventures in 3D printing

We wanted to share an update on our ongoing 3D printing adventures. Good news Here’s the smaller part I mentioned before, the one that came out perfectly using PLA at 15% fill on the printer we’ve been working with all … Continue reading

Adventures in 3D printing

Our Digitization Manager, Jeremiah, has been working on a local grant to develop a way to capture relief data from otherwise mostly flat materials like embossed paper, wax seals on envelopes, and the surface of coins. The project is currently … Continue reading