By Maegan Rocio
Staff Writer
Because of the collaborative efforts of the Texas Collection and the Baylor Electronic Library, anyone can take a stroll down Baylor’s historic line.
In celebration of homecoming, the Texas Collection will showcase six to seven pages from The Baylor Lariat and a number of special pages of the Round Up yearbook focusing on past homecomings at Baylor.
The display will be open from 8 a.m. to noon Friday and Saturday after the homecoming parade, which lasts from 8 to 11 a.m. and will end in front of Carroll Library where the Texas Collection is housed.
John Wilson, director of the Texas Collection, said the display will include old football programs and information about the Baylor homecoming traditions that were observed in the past.
Wilson said the display at the Texas Collection is also meant to announce the online Lariat and Round Up archives that are part of the Baylor University Digital Collection are now available to the general public.
“What we really wanted to do was to announce that now anyone can search the Lariats even if you’re not on campus, when you graduate, or when you have a family member that wants to know what was going on in the past,” he said. “You’ve got the entire history of the Lariat online.”
Eric Ames, the curator of digital collections at Baylor, said the exhibit holds great significance for homecoming.
“It’s significant because it gives people who are coming back to campus the chance to relieve history in exciting in new way,” he said. “It makes sense to promote them for the people who are focusing on Baylor and its history during homecoming.”
Wilson said the role of the collaboration between the Texas Collection and the Baylor Electronic Library was to make the information accessible to anyone through the online Lariat and Round Up digital archives.
“In the past, you would have to go and pull all the historic copies of them, which was time-consuming and laborious,” he said. “If you didn‘t know what you were hunting for or knew the date, you wouldn’t be able to find what would’ve transpired. It’s a tremendous timesaver, but it’s also very convenient. You don’t have to come in and search for it.”
Ames said the Round Up collection includes scanned copies from 1896 and 1902 – 1980.
He said the total online Lariat digital collection contains 11,270 items that are divided into two archives.
One archive spans from 1900 to 2006 and the other from 2007 until now.
The latter can be found at the Lariat homepage, www.baylorlariat.com.
Ames said creating the digital archives for the Lariat and Round-Up was a long process.
“We started working on the Lariats about three years ago and that was the early planning stages,” he said. “The volumes from the Texas Collection were delivered here and scanned for the digital collections.”
Ames said the staff of the electronic collections utilized a large -format scanner, software and metadata, informational input about the digital objects such as headlines and publication dates. He said by typing in key information, visitors can find specific articles, issues and information from the Lariat and Round Up archives.
Amanda Norton, the university archivist at Baylor, said the files are important because they are a record of Baylor’s history.
“It’s a really good way to get inside what the students thought were important, what was going on both at Baylor and just in national history as well,” she said. “You’ll find articles about everything from little snippets in the early papers about who is visiting us, coming and going and such persons, the fashions of the time, the activities with the professors.”
Ames, who worked on creating the archives, said it was interesting to learn about the daily history of Baylor.
“For past 100 years, it was interesting to see world events, things happening on campus and around world first and reports about things that happened on Baylor, and got to see what happened in detail,” Ames said.
The Texas Collection is open from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday.
The Round Up archives can be found online at the Baylor Libraries Digital Collections website under Baylor University Annuals.
The recent lariat archives can be found at www.baylorlariat.com
For questions about the digital collection, please send an email to digitalcollectionsinfo@baylor.edu.
