UofS Football Archives now online

The University of Scranton’s football team may no longer be around (in fact, it’s famous on campus for being “undefeated since 1960″), but at the Weinberg Memorial Library, UofS football is back in a big way.  This week, the Library is proud to announce the University of Scranton Football Collection, a digitized version of our football archives.

The collection includes over a thousand photographs of University of Scranton (and St. Thomas College) football teams, players, coaches, and games – as well as photos of the cheerleaders and marching bands who cheered them on.  The collection also features a set of football game programs.  The programs, produced for each home game, have team rosters, statistics, and game analysis.  Most of the materials come from the years 1900 through 1960, when the varsity football team was disbanded.

This collection isn’t just for UofS football fans, though.  The game programs in particular are a rich resource for researchers interested in the history of Scranton and its surrounding area.  The programs were sponsored by local businesses (like the Hotel Casey), so the booklets serve as miniature “time capsules” showing slices of Scranton life over time.

We invite all students, staff, alumni, and community members to browse and search the collection at www.scranton.edu/library/football.  You may also want to take a look at our brief history of University of Scranton football.

P.S. While we have identified many of the photographs, some are still mysteries.  If you recognize a player, please let us know!  You can contact the Digital Services department at 570-941-7003.

Many thanks to librarian Kay Lopez, library systems specialist Jennifer Maher, and digital services assistant Kevin Pheasey, who all dedicated many hours of hard work to this project.

Nay Aug Park photos

We’ve just added some old photographs of the amusement park at Nay Aug Park in Scranton to our Flickr collection.  Please take a look and either help us date/describe them, or just post some of your memories of Nay Aug!

The photos were contributed by Weinberg Memorial Library Associate Director Bonnie Strohl, whose father and uncle owned the park (called Nay Aug Amuseument Company).

Aquinas online, old and new

Did you know that that archival issues of the Aquinas, the University of Scranton’s 77-year-old student newspaper, are available online? In the Weinberg Memorial Library’s digital collection, you can browse and search every issue from Vol. 1, No. 1 (October 16, 1931) through the last issue of 2007 (May 10).

(Side note: We love reading Tommyrot, a gossip column in the 1930s and 1940s that reported all the campus dirt.)

If you’re looking for current Aquinas articles, be sure to check out www.scrantonaquinas.com, where you can find the latest student news.  You can also follow @scrantonaquinas on Twitter for updates.

Congrats, Coach Strong!

Congratulations to Mike Strong, coach of the University of Scranton’s women’s basketball team, on his 700th win!  Coach Strong joined the “700 club” of the NCAA’s winningest coaches this Sunday when the Lady Royals beat Drew, 73-54.

In celebration of this milestone, I searched the University of Scranton Digital Yearbook Collection and found this photo of Coach Strong (on the left in the third row) and the Lady Royals, on p. 62 of the 1980 Windhover yearbook:

If you want to read more about Coach Strong’s 700th win, check out the University press release, or “The 700 Club,” an article by Scott Walsh that was in Monday’s Scranton Times-Tribune.

U of Scranton yearbooks online, from Aquinas to Windhover

January, named after the Roman god of gates and doorways, is not only a great month to celebrate the new year, but also to remember the past. The Weinberg Memorial Library has just made it even easier to reminisce by digitizing all of the University of Scranton’s yearbooks, from the 1916 Aquinas to the 2007 Windhover.

The Weinberg Memorial Library’s Digital Services department is proud to present the University of Scranton Digital Yearbook Collection, a 74 volume set of almost 20,000 digitized pages – all available to the public. You can browse the books to get a feel for each year’s unique student culture, or search the books to find photographs of your favorite University faculty, staff, and alumni!

Questions or comments? Contact the WML Digital Services department at (570) 941-7003.

Going digital

A page from "Prominent Men of Scranton and Vicinity"

This fall, the Weinberg Memorial Library is one of 14 institutions participating in a mass digitization pilot project.  The program is headed by PALINET, a network of more than 600 libraries, archives, and museums  in the mid-Atlantic region, with a goal of making electronic copies of interesting books available to the public via the internet.

So far, we’ve had six local history books digitized by Internet Archive.   All six were written before 1923, which means means that they’re in the public domain – so we can post them on the internet without violating anyone’s intellectual property rights.  What’s fantastic about the digitized books is that:

1. they’re now accessible to anyone, anywhere, anytime (while the physical books are only available to people who visit the WML Special Collections library in person, during limited hours), and
2. they’re full-text searchable!

Check out our books on the Internet Archive website here.  You can browse through the books using the “flip book” viewer, and you can also download PDF copies of each book.  If your family is from the area, be sure to use the full text search box in the flip book viewer to search for your last name – the books are great resources for genealogists.  Or just look at the great pictures, like this 1882 line drawing of the proposed design for the Lackawanna County Courthouse from “Memorial of the Erection of Lackawanna County” (if it looks a bit different from what you see on the Square today, it is!) –

Proposed Lackawanna County Courthouse, 1882