Remembering Apollo 11, Honoring Glynn S. Lunney H’71

Today is the 45th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, so it seems like a good day to honor NASA flight director Glynn S. Lunney H’71. A native of Old Forge, Lunney graduated from Scranton Prep and studied at the University of Scranton before receiving his B.S. in aerospace engineering from the University of Detroit.

Check out the full citation for his 1971 honorary doctor of laws degree in our digital collections! If you’re on campus, you can also browse through some newspaper clippings about his appearance and address at undergraduate commencement that year.

Hey! You! Get into our (Dura)Cloud!

DuraCloud logo

The Weinberg Memorial Library’s got a brand new cloud – and unlike Mick Jagger’s, on ours, not even two terabytes are a crowd.

Thanks to our new partnership with DuraCloud, the master files from our digital collections are now being preserved in a more robust repository, where we can monitor the health of our bitstreams, discover and repair any corruption or damage, and automatically back everything up offsite in Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier cloud storage.

This is a pretty important step up for us. Since our beginnings in 2008, our digital collections have expanded from 0 to 1.75 terabytes (that’s about 1,792 gigabytes!), with no signs of stopping anytime soon. At that scale, it was getting difficult for us to manage our own local and remote backups, and we were quickly running out of local storage space. The move to DuraCloud not only smooths out our workflow, it also gives us plenty of room to grow for the future.

As an added bonus, thanks to interoperability between DuraCloud and our Archive-It web archiving service, all of the web content that we capture for preservation from University-related sites will be automatically backed up in DuraCloud, too.

All of these changes are on the back end, so users won’t notice any difference – you can still search and browse our digital collections at www.scranton.edu/library/digitalcollections.

Celebrating Our Towns: Lackawanna County Centennial Books and Community Histories

Our friends over at the Lackawanna Valley Digital Archives (LVDA) have just announced a new digital collection of local history materials:

Celebrating Our Towns—Lackawanna County Centennial Books and Community Histories is a collection of books honoring Lackawanna county towns, townships, boroughs, cities and areas.  These books were published by local authors and centennial groups to celebrate their towns.  This wonderful collection was made possible by a grant from the Willary Foundation.

One of our favorites is the Historical Booklet and Guide from Scranton’s Diamond Jubilee and Centennial celebration in 1941. Nearby towns represented in the collection include Archbald, Carbondale, Clarks Summit, Dunmore, Olyphant, and Throop, among several others.

Break a Leg, Players!

It’s opening night for the University of Scranton Players’ production of the musical She Loves Me, with the Weinberg Memorial Library’s own David Hunisch performing the role of Ladislav Sipos and Ian O’Hara playing in the pit.

To the entire cast and crew, from your friends and fans at the Library: break a leg!

Good Luck, Coach Strong!

Good luck to the Lady Royals in their game this afternoon against Juniata! If they win, it will be the team’s 11th win for the season — and the 800th win of Coach Mike Strong’s career, which would make him the first coach in NCAA Division III women’s basketball history to reach that milestone.

Strong became head coach for the Lady Royals in 1979. Here’s a photo of Coach Strong with his team from the 1980 Windhover yearbook:

Mike Strong with the 1980 Lady Royals

 

Gifts for Archivists: Zaner-Bloser Moleskine Notebooks

Many thanks to ArchiveGrid Blog for including our custom-printed Zaner-Bloser Moleskine Notebooks on their list of “24 Fun and Practical Gifts for Archivists”! We’re proud to share a blog post with these nifty Oinx microfiche necklaces and Green Market’s “The Archivist” scented candles.

As always, all proceeds from notebook sales benefit the preservation and digitization of our Zaner-Bloser Penmanship Collection.

Acts of Faith: University’s 125th Anniversary Celebrated in Times-Tribune

Sunday Times

The Scranton Times-Tribune dedicated a special insert in today’s Sunday Times to the University’s 125th Anniversary celebration – with lots of great photos from the Times-Tribune files as well as images from our own University Archives digital collections.

Check out the Times-Tribune website for all of the section’s articles, an interactive timeline, and a map of campus growth – or stop by the Library to take a look at the print version!

Honor Roll, 1945

HonorRoll

In honor of our many veterans: This Honor Roll booklet from January 1945 lists 1,835 University of Scranton students and alumni who had served in the armed forces.

Find photographs, documents, news clippings, and more about the many veterans in the University community in our digital collections.

 

Clippings Collection: 100 Years of University of Scranton News

ClippingsCollnFor the past few months, we’ve been working on a giant digital collections project. Earlier this year, in preparation for the University’s 125th anniversary, we digitized 97 oversized scrapbooks, filled with newspaper clippings about the University, that were hiding in our basement.

There’s an immense variety of materials inside the books – some are dedicated to academics, others to athletics and alumni – and they date from as early as the 1890s to as recent as the 1980s. Some of the scrapbooks were in good shape, while others were falling apart:

What we’re working on now is processing and cataloging the digitized images, to make them easy to browse and search. While we’re only about a quarter of the way done, you can take a look at our progress by searching and browsing 9,000+ articles from the 20 scrapbooks currently available in our new University of Scranton Clippings Collection.

Note: Items in this collection are restricted to on-campus users only, but off-campus users will still be able to search and browse records for the articles.

We’ll be adding articles from the rest of the scrapbooks throughout the year, so check back often! You can also send questions or comments to us at digitalcollections@scranton.edu.