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This
photo of the Eagle staff, undated in the archives, is
circa October 1939.
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Eagle
Archives Go Digital
Back
in 1932, a professor named Edward Henry had a prediction. The days of
traveling to faraway libraries would someday, come to an end.
Professor Henry, the Eagle reported, believed that materials stored in
archives would one day be put onto film, so that any scholar would be
able to “examine them at his leisure in his own study or laboratory.”
More than 70 years have passed, but that leisurely examination now includes
Henry’s own words, printed on a day that also trumpeted the graduation
of AU’s seventh undergraduate class.
The long-discussed project to digitize the Eagle in a searchable database
is finally finished and is available online to anyone in the world with
an Internet connection. Covering the entire period from 1925 to 1996,
it is thought to be one of the first and most extensive student newspaper
collections to go online.
Many schools have discussed digitizing their collections, but AU had a
few lucky breaks. The software is so expensive that schools often need
to create consortiums to afford it—but AU already belonged to the
Washington Research Library Consortium, which sponsored the project as
the WRLC Student Newspaper Collection, noted librarian Jim Heintze.
While the collection also includes digitized versions of the Georgetown
student newspaper from 1959 to 1980, and is expected to include other
consortium schools in time, AU had microfilmed virtually all issues of
the Eagle years ago. So once the money was raised and the technical issues
were addressed, digitizing was relatively simple.
The 1932 issue that covers Professor Henry’s prediction also prints
a student’s passionate antiwar poem. Another student raves about
the latest Hollywood sex symbol, Jean Harlow. And there’s a mention
of an annual AU seminar in Palestine, which had inspired commentary as
early as the 1920s on the “tense situation” between “Jews
and Mohammedans” and the need for “justice to both the Arab
and the Jew.”
Student writers have, it seems, always been a bit addicted to hyperbole.
In the 1930s, all three powers on campus—the administration, the
Board of Trustees, and student government—were compared at one point
to Hitler. Over the years, Eagle writers spoke out against many things:
communists, anticommunists, the war in Vietnam, Reagan, and Saddam Hussein.
Budding TV critic Tom Shales, now a veteran TV critic for the Washington Post, was against
Natalie Wood (“who should never be in another movie in which she
is required to speak”), while another writer was against the Grateful
Dead’s 1972 five-hour jam on campus (“Who can forget the
$30,000 it cost? Who can forget the aggravation it caused? Who can forget
the 25 ODs?”).
To peruse the digital archives is to scan history through the eyes of
young people. “And being available on the Web, it’s available
24-7. It makes this a resource truly accessible to all,” says AU archivist
Susan McElrath.
As for Professor Henry’s prediction, AU now does him one better.
Not only can the collection be examined from one’s own study, but
as McElrath says, “You can do it from bed, if you really want to.”
-Sally Acharya originally published in American
Weekly
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