Category Archives: Students

IWU and war-time activities

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Memorial Day seems like a good time to highlight military-related documents held at IWU. Students, alumni, faculty and administrators have served in all U.S. wars since IWU’s founding. Diaries, correspondence, service records and recollections are held in both our archives and special collections.

Examples of these documents include service applications of the WWII-era Nurse’s Cadet Corps, alumni responses to a post-WWII survey of activities, correspondence from WWII soldiers to IWU student Nell Carmichael, correspondence and sketches from alumnus and Professor of Art Fred Brain to his family during WWII, index of WWI veterans plus photocopied clippings of articles related to their service, Nursing Superintendent Maude Essig’s WWI diary, and administrative meeting notes and student reporting on war-related activities on campus and abroad.

We lack significant documentation on the WWII-era S.A.T.C. and welcome donations related to this group’s purpose and activities on campus. Some dilligent researcher’s eyes may uncover details on this and other student groups’ efforts in existing documentation, and all our records are open and available for that work. Leave a reply (below) to contact me about arranging a visit!

French texts

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Special Collections holds a number of volumes in French. One part of these holdings was described at the time of donation as “French Socialist Literature,” but topics vary and include literature and politics with dates ranging from the early-1800s to mid-1900s. Selected titles follow:

Clerget, Pierre. La Suisse au XXe Siecle: Etude Economique et Sociale. Paris: Colin, 1908.

Duffeyte-Dilhan, J. Aux Femmes: De La Beaute Physique et Morale. Paris: Janet, 1857.

Francis, de Sales, Saint. Lettres de Saint Francois de Sales: Addressees a des Gens du Monde. Paris: Techener, 1865.

Gide, Charles. Les Societes Cooperatives de Consommation. Paris: Colin, 1910.

Janin, Jules Gabriel. Un Hiver a Paris. Paris: Curmer, 1843.

Kern, Alfred. Le Bonheur Fragile. Paris: Gallimard, 1960.

Lesseps, Ferdinand de. Souvenirs de Quarante Ans Dedies a Mes Enfants. 2 vols. Paris: Nouvelle Revue, 1887.

Digital Commons

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The Ames Library’s Digital Initiatives Team launched IWU’s electronic record storage and access system in fall 2008. Digital Commons serves as the central location for outstanding student work, faculty scholarship, University records, and campus history. It holds 3,552 works to date. To launch this repository, the archives supplied research honors theses and scores dating back to the 1960s, as well as peer-reviewed student journals.

 

Our goals are to:

  • Promote and disseminate academic and creative achievements of students and faculty
  • Ensure preservation of and persistent access to said work
  • Increase discovery of IWU scholarship and artistic expressions
  • Foster scholarly collaborations with colleagues
  • Document and record IWU’s history and progress

If you create or control documents related to University history and have been wondering how to store them electronically, leave me a comment below and I will walk you through what DC @ IWU can do for you. If you are interested in getting faculty or staff members’ scholarly or creative works into DC, or wish to recommend outstanding student scholarship from your department, contact our Scholarly Communications Librarians Stephanie Davis-Kahl: sdaviska {at} iwu.edu.

Subscribe to this blog!

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I will add content to this blog a couple of times a week, and an archives student assistant is taking on the task of scanning and adding photos. We created the “Help ID Photos!” page as a place viewers can see and comment on images we have little or no information about.

In summary, the content on all these pages will build over time but at irregular intervals. If you want to keep up with new additions but don’t want to bother checking the site regularly, there is a way to be notified of changes here just when we add things. Click on the word “posts” with the orange button next to it at the top of the blog pages for ways to get notified via RSS feeds.

If you’re not sure what RSS is or what it can do for you, check out this YouTube video describing RSS (Really Simple Syndication): RSS in Plain English or consult Rick Lindquist’s Technology at IWU blog post on the subject!

IWU’s longest-running student publication

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The Argus Digital Collection was our first large-scale digitization project. Illinois Wesleyan University’s newspaper The Argus has been published under student supervision continuously since 1894. For most of that time, it has been a weekly publication. This site went live with a browse-by-date interface in May 2003. Searchable sets of indexed terms became available in September 2003 and cover 1955-2003. Issues published since 2004 are available from the same link and are full text searchable within their individual pdfs.

A new project to make The Argus fully searchable is currently under way. Stay tuned for news on its progress!