LibGuides: Special Collections: Researching Augustana College History: Photographs and Audiovisual Material

Photographs

There are thousands of photographs in Special Collections, and they may be found in many different places. While we do have a photograph collection, there are also photos that are part of individual manuscript collections, photos in vertical files, and photos that have been printed in books and other publications. Photographs can be difficult to organize and describe, and they may not always be described in a way that enables the type of search and retrieval you need for a particular project. Nevertheless, we have many ways to help you locate relevant photographs, and we are happy to help you with the search process.

Augustana College Special Collections on Flickr
Our Flickr site provides an easy, intuitive way to browse through a small selection of digital images scanned from photographs in our collections. It is intended for casual browsing rather than in-depth research. This is a great place to start, but in many cases you will need to go beyond our Flickr site.
Upper Mississippi Valley Digital Image Archive (UMVDIA)
The UMVDIA is a collaborative project created by a group of cultural heritage institutions in the greater Quad Cities region. While it includes quite a bit more than just Augustana-related photographs, it does contain many photographs of the college, most from our own Special Collections and a few from other libraries and archives. To locate the photos of Augustana in this database, go to the Advanced Search page, change the search type from "All Fields" to "Subject" and enter "Augustana College" as your search term.
Augustana Observer and Rockety-I Database
Sometimes the simplest way to locate photographs of people, places, and events on campus is to search in the Augustana Observer (student newspaper) and the Rockety-I (yearbook). While the image quality won't be as good as a digital copy of an original photograph, the ability to search the text accompanying the photos often makes this a great choice. This database contains digital copies of the Augustana Observer from 1902-2016 and the Rockety-I (yearbook) from 1900-2004. The digital images have been rendered full-text searchable using optical character recognition (OCR) technology. This means you can search for keywords or phrases within the pages of the newspaper and yearbooks. This is a tremendous digital resource, but requires some patience and practice to use effectively. Please pay careful attention to the instructions provided on the landing page, and make sure you are using Internet Explorer to access the database.

In addition to the electronic resources listed above, don't forget that there are many photographs in our manuscript collections, and you can search the finding aids for those collections online (see the Manuscript Collections section of this LibGuide for information on how to do this). You may find specific descriptions of individual photos or less specific descriptions of groups of photos; it all depends on the nature of the collection you are looking at.

Finally, the most substantial source of college photos is our photograph collection, and that collection has no database or searchable discovery tool available for public use. However, Special Collections staff can use various methods to search for you if you have a specific topic such as a person, place, or event that you are researching. To ask for a photo search, please visit the reading room during open hours, call, or email using the contact information at left and provide as much detail as you can about what it is that you are looking for.

Audiovisual Material

While our collections do include a substantial amount of audiovisual material, most of these items are in formats for which we do not have any available playback mechanism on site. A small portion of audiovisual materials have been reformatted/digitized, and some of those may be accessed online via our digital collections (see links below) while others may require a visit to the reading room. If you wish to access an audiovisual item that has not yet been reformatted, the item will first have to be sent to an audiovisual preservation digitization service provider for reformatting to the appropriate preservation standards, which can be a costly and time-consuming process. As we do not have a dedicated budget for audiovisual reformatting, all costs for digitizing audiovisual material will be passed on to the patron requesting access.

There is audiovisual content in many different manuscript collections, but certain collections contain especially large concentrations of Augustana-related AV material. The links below will take you directly to the finding aids for these collections.

Manuscript Collections containing Augustana-related AV material:

Digital Collections containing Augustana-related AV material:

Digital Special Collections: Augustana College Audiovisual Collection
This digital collection contains a sampling of materials from the Augustana College audiovisual collection (MSS 395 in our manuscript collections). Representing approximately a tenth of total material in the source manuscript collection, the digital collection includes moving image footage of various types from the 1930's to the 1990's. The content is primarily promotional footage and special events. From the landing page from the collection, click on "browse all items in the collection" to see a complete listing.
Digital Special Collections: Oral History Interviews
This digital collection contains a wide range of oral history interviews produced by Augustana faculty, staff, and students from the 1980's through the 2010's. Items in this digital collection are part of the Oral History Interviews manuscript collection (MSS 291). Some were born digital and some have been digitized from analog audio formats. The subject matter of many of the interviews is pertinent to the history of Augustana College, but there are also groups of interviews conducted by students for oral history courses that focused on various local history topics that may or may not touch directly on Augustana's history. From the landing page from the collection, click on "browse all items in the collection" to see a complete listing.