Earliest Issues of Alumni Review Available Online

Posted on March 2, 2010

As part of its project to digitize the special collections of its library, UNC has made the earliest copies of the GAA’s alumni magazine, founded in 1912 as the Alumni Review, available online.

All issues of the Alumni Review that are now in the public domain, starting with the first in October 1912 through the Commencement issue of 1924, are available on the library’s Web site. You can page through each issue, advertisements and all, by clicking the mouse.

Issues published after 1924, which remain under the GAA’s copyright, also are expected to be digitized, with a goal of having all issues dating to 1912 available in time for the magazine’s 100th anniversary in 2012. Currently, the GAA offers digital editions of the Review from 2007 to the present in its member-only area of its Web site.

The state has given Wilson Library $400,000, renewable for each of three years, to acquire fast and sophisticated equipment and to pay technicians to begin digitizing both its collection and historical resources across the state — page by painstaking page. Quite a bit of it is a few clicks away already, including Yackety Yacks (currently 1901 through 1966), family correspondence, slave records, photographs by famous North Carolina photographers and old maps.

The State Library in Raleigh has asked UNC to be the digital host for the state. As the project grows, Wilson will consult libraries, historical societies and others, as well as scouring for private collectors.

Wilson’s core work will be opening serious research material to the anytime, anywhere user. The Southern Historical Collection will offer entire manuscript collections or large portions of collections.

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More online…

• Carolina Alumni Review archive, 1912 to the present, on the GAA’s Web site

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