One hundred years from now, your grandchildren might be reading this article from when you were in college.
Dixie State University has several on-campus resources available to all types of students. One resource, in particular, is the Special Collections and Archives Library located on the third floor of the Jeffery R. Holland Centennial Commons building.
The Special Collections Archives Library is place where documents, books and even pictures can be viewed by students for research projects under the supervision of someone on staff as many items are fragile or irreplaceable.
The archives are home to a variety of aged knowledge; some documents and books even date back to the 1700s.
Heather Sinclair, assistant professor of history, said the archives offer an opportunity and a resource for students’ research.
While the archives are home to several pieces of work, Sinclair said she was more focused on what has happened in the community surrounding us, as it can help students with their research.
Sinclair said, “We’re always looking for resources that are local that students can relate to.”
Sinclair said she wants things to start becoming more digitized, which will provide students with even easier access to documents.
Kathleen Broeder, assistant librarian for the Special Collections and Archives Library, said she has been in the process of collecting the Dixie Sun News stories, dating all the way back to 1913.
“It would be good to look at how they handled their finances and see how they did things back in the day.”
Isabella Davis, sophomore accounting major
Broeder said this project started as a partnership between University of Utah and Ancestry. The partnership is having universities around Utah gather the student newspapers so they can then be digitized.
Broeder said most of what is in the archives are documents and pictures from the early forming of this region.
“Ancestry will keep a copy of the newspapers to go into their online newspaper database,” said Broeder, “We will also have a copy going into Utah Digital Newspapers.”
There is one slight problem in the future for digitizing the newspapers, Broeder said: Not all texts translate easy to a digitized version, and even with the use of digitization, formats and technology are rapidly changing, making formats easily outdated and unusable in some cases.
While the archives seem like a place mainly for historians, Isabella Davis, a sophomore accounting major from Hurricane, said she would find the archives useful when researching to see how math and accounting were like several years ago.
Davis said, “It would be good to look at how they handled their finances and see how they did things back in the day.”
The archives allow students to look into the past to see how life was in this area long before we arrived. The archives provide an opportunity not only for students but for faculty and staff alike.
The Special Collections Archives Library is located on the third floor of the Jeffery R. Holland Centennial Commons building in room 330. The hours are Monday through Friday at 10-12pm or 1-5pm by appointment. If the door is closed ring the doorbell on the outside to notify someone you’re outside.
