Reinhardt Archives Going Digital!

There's an exciting project underway at the Hill Freeman Library and Spruill Learning Center Archives. Most of you may not have had the occasion to peruse the college archives. Due to security concerns, library policy states that access to the archive room is restricted to staff or patrons accompanied by staff. We have some fascinating things over here. In addition to our collection of Reinhardt memorabilia, publications such as The Hiltonian and The Phoenix, many rare books of regional history and the Annie Laurie Jones Cunyus Hymnal Collection, we have many historic letters and documents from the entire history of Reinhardt College as well as many old photographs, some dating from the nineteenth century.

Fortunately, we are working on a way to open up access to our archives without either compromising security or necessitating a staff escort. All you will need is a computer with an Internet connection.

For the past eight months, our intrepid Special Projects Librarian Larry DeLapp has been diligently scanning photographs and documents with an eye to putting them up on our Web site one day.

"He's already done all the pictures we have, and now he's working on documents such as letters from our presidents and college officials, correspondence from Captain Reinhardt, bank statements, deeds, some reports on the state of the college, some speeches," says archivist Joel Langford (I want to be his disciple for Reinhardt College history). "He just has a couple more collections to go."

"It's an extremely interesting job; it's very worthwhile," Larry says. "There is nothing more interesting to me than history, and that's what we're dealing with here." He adds that he loves the old photographs and the wartime documents. "It's interesting how we survived and grew despite two world wars."

We won't be able to digitize the entire archives of course, as many of our holdings are protected by copyright, but we look forward to offering what we can in pdf form on our Web site soon.