Scrapbooking

Around the D is back!  A technical glitch kept us off-line for a week (but happily not one we caused.)  While we haven’t been blogging, we’ve been busy with student projects – focusing on scrapbooks.

Cover of Roy Perry’s scrapbook. He was a member of the class of 1916.

Archivists love them and hate them. On one hand scrapbooks can be wonderful documentation of an event, organization or even student life. On the other, they are a mass of glue, photographs, cut up original documents , pins, ribbons, and other odd bits. They can be difficult to store and preserve (all those odd bits falling out of place or photos sticking together). Digitizing them, which seems at first glance a good option, can be amazingly complicated.

Ribbons adorning invitations in Marshall Doggett’s (1922) scrapbook.

At Davidson, we mostly love them and have collected a wide variety. The oldest dates from 1898 and is a collection of cartoons related to the Spanish-American War and the most recent covers the Davidson Historical Society up to 2011.

Cutting photos into shapes isn’t a new phenomenon, Davidson students did in the 1920s.

In between, there are scrapbooks from student organizations – YMCA, Eumenean Society, fraternities and eating houses; from academic departments (Library, ROTC, Theatre); from local organizations (book clubs, DAR, church groups) and from alumni. The alumni ones date from 1908 to 1994 with the 1920s and 1930s being the prime scrapbooking eras for Davidson.

One of 2 scrapbooks from the Battle of Cowan’s Ford chapter of the DAR.

In the last 2 weeks, our scrapbooks have been coming off the shelf and into student hands. Students in Introduction to Digital Art, searched the scrapbooks for images to use in learning new techniques for manipulating photographs. The students in Digital History of American Knowledge used the same books – plus a few more – to practice their metadata skills. Metadata being the current term for cataloging and indexing – coming up with terms to describe items. They will be creating online exhibits around historical documents –moving history into the digital age.

2015 student with 1925 scrapbooks

More Art students will be using the scrapbooks for projects related to Digital Storytelling. In the coming weeks, as the projects for all these classes are completed, we’ll be sharing links to show how something old and can new again and why we keep making space for those messy, complicated and always fun scrapbooks.