This Homecoming weekend marks the unveiling of past social clubs’ scrapbooks for online viewing. Some scrapbooks date back to 1970. The library employees involved have worked hard to begin the process of making Harding’s history viewable to anyone.
“It is a joint project, one that many of us have wanted to begin for some time now,” library director Ann Dixon said.
Dixon has worked at Harding for 13 years and said she feels this is a step in the right direction.
“What we want to do is to preserve as much of Harding’s history as we can,” Dixon said.
Winnie Bell, a retired Library director for the Brackett library, first began this journey to preserve Harding’s history by making it her retirement project to index the Bison newspaper. Bell’s desire to hold on to Harding’s past has encouraged current librarians to expose social clubs’ earlier years.
“These scrapbooks are under people’s beds and in attics and they’re just deteriorating,” Dixon said. “We want to preserve these and we can do that digitally so they aren’t lost forever.”
The scrapbooks on the website are made to look realistic and even have the sounds of pages turning when going to the next page of the scrapbook. The page is easy to navigate and even has a mobile site to view on a phone.
Brenda Breezeel, systems administrator for the Brackett Library, said she hopes that this will encourage people to look at Harding’s past online.
“We want to make available Harding’s history for people to view it from wherever they are,” Breezeel said.
The librarians said they hope that by exposing this new project, many others will want to send their club scrapbooks to be made digital.
Breezeel said the librarians have acquired a significant number of scrapbooks and said they are hoping to acquire more. She also said that Homecoming weekend seems to the librarians like the perfect weekend to unveil this new project.
“Homecoming is a time for people to come back and reminisce about when they were at Harding,” Breezeel said.
By doing this, Breezeel and Dixon have hopes of this being just the beginning of a long and ongoing project.
“We’re just trying to get to a place where we can share all this history with anyone who wants to see it,” Dixon said.
According to Dixon, there will be a link from the library’s homepage to the club scrapbook page.
“This is really the beginning,” Breezeel said.”It’s a work in progress that we hope to continue.”
