S P R I N G 2 0 2 2 | 3 9 GIVING DAY April 27, 2022 Giving Day is a 24-hour event where alumni, faculty, staff, students, parents and friends come together to make a big impact on Lehigh and our students. Join us to help us reach our goal of unlocking 100% of our matches and challenges at lehighgivingday.com. REUNION June 9–12, 2022 Campus Join the celebration to rekindle old friendships and make new ones. Due to the pandemic, both Reunion 2020 and Reunion 2021 were postponed, thus Reunion Weekend 2022 will welcome 42 classes to celebrate their milestones together on campus. Registration opened March 14, 2022. alum.lu/reunion S POT L I GHT ALUMNI EVENTS All alumni, parents and friends are welcome at Lehigh events. Find the complete calendar online anytime at mylehigh. lehigh.edu/events. It was a prophetic moment when Alex Japha came across an article in the fall 1996 edition of the Lehigh Bulletin about the importance of preserving the university’s print and digital materials, including creating a lasting record of them on the internet. Japha spotted it as he was reviewing digitized copies of the alumni magazine that he and a group of work-study students finished scanning last year, immortalizing more than 100 years of the Bulletin in Lehigh’s digital repository. Thearticlewaswritten just three years after theWorldWideWeb became public domain, and 20 years before Japha, the digital archivist for Special Collections, started his career withLehighLibraries. “Without preserving our past, we have no future,” says the article, which is titled “A Race Against Time.” The effort to finish digitizing more than 100 years worth of Bulletin magazines is one of the library system’s latest preservation efforts. Published by the Lehigh University Alumni Association since 1913, the Bulletin is released three times per year and distributed to 75,000 alumni around the country. It is read by manymore alumni, staff and students online. “We know they are verymuch in demand, very useful and have very rich content,” Japha said. “Other than the The Brown and White student newspaper, it’s the best place to get university history or information about the people who attended here.” Issues from 1913 to 1950 were digitized beginning in 2009 and uploaded in 2011 to the library’s collection in the Internet Archive, but the time and staff the project required delayed continuing. Japha and a group of 15 work-study students picked it up again in August 2020 and finished scanning the next 70 years of issues in November 2021. “Our undergraduate work-study students do most of the physical scanning and metadata creation,” Japha explained. “We have four overhead scanners, which is important to make sure the book lies open and flat so you don’t crush anything.” Issues can be searched by key phrases and downloaded as plain text. The Alumni Association created the Bulletin under the editorship of Raymond W. Walters, Class of 1907. It started as a “newsy” 12-page pamphlet of information about noteworthy things happening at Lehigh, such as statistics on how the football and other sports teams were doing. It also had a class column that stated how many men were attending college (Lehigh’s first women students were admitted in 1971). Today its class columns are rich with updates on alumni, and its pages are filled with stories that focus on campus events and initiatives, research, culture, athletics and alumni profiles. Japha said that a total of 655 issues have been digitized, dating back to 1913. In addition to preserving the Bulletin, the libraries also preserve university websites in their entirety, including web versions of the Bulletin. There’s a project underway to digitize the speeches of famed alumand American automobile executive Lee Iacocca ’45. “The scale of digital collections is always growing, but new tools and technologies have consistently been developed to help keep up with the ever-expanding universe of electronic files,” Japha said. “We now have hundreds of thousands of digital files, accounting for multiple terabytes of data, safely stored and accessible to the public.” Alumni remain the greatest asset to preserving Lehigh’s history, Japha said. Those who think they may have material of interest to the library are welcome to email inspc@lehigh.edu.—Christina Tatu Going Digital N O T E S C H R I S T A N E U
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