Power of SUNY - the history

SUNY was formally established in 1949. In the picture here we see the presidents of the various state colleges posing for the launch of the new system. Brockport was represented by President Tower (whom Tower Fine Arts is named after, 2nd from the left, 2nd row.) It was a historic moment. Unlike many other states, which already had extensive, well established public higher education systems at that time (think Ohio State for example,) New York did not. Our state's public higher education was dominated by a network of prominent and politically powerful private colleges. The public higher education system was a weak network of small teacher training colleges and technical schools.

The 1949 launch of SUNY marked a shift towards a much more robust higher education system, and one that offered opportunity to many potential students who could not have afforded a private school education, and who perhaps would not have been accepted in the private schools of that day, which were not always welcoming of diversity.

That JFK library has nothing on us ;-)

Recently the library blog commented on the JFK Presidential Library and its massive digitization campaign. Well, maybe they do have a little something on our archives, we certainly don't have the resources they do.  Even so, college archivist Mary Jo Gigliotti and her student assistants have been working hard these last years to digitize our more significant archival holdings. Shown here is an example, the cover of the first issue of the Normalia from 1900. The Normalia was a predecessor to the Stylus, which started in 1914, and like the early Stylus it was a mix of news, literary pieces and so forth. Both the cover and the content of this title are being scanned by the college archives staff so that they will be available more widely.

"X" marks the spot

Well, OK, there isn't actually an "X" marking the spot :-) What you're looking for on this map is where it says "State Normal School," which was our official designation when this 1872 street map was drawn. See, we really have been in this location for many years, 175 actually!

We will continue to post here about the history of our school, and there will be more campus events taking place as well as the college continues its celebration of this anniversary in 2011. Please do let us know of any aspects of the college history you would like to hear more about! Place a comment here, or email ccowling@brockport.edu.

(Shown here is a portion of a "plat" map, a map which shows the properties and names of owners in a given area. You will see properties and houses on the edge of what is now all part of Hartwell Hall's lawn. We have an 1872 and a 1902 plat map book for Monroe County in our local history collections.)

Archives web site

A reader recently posted to this blog asking where they could see more information on the campus school. The answer was at the archives web site, http://www.brockport.edu/archives/. There is a good bit of history of our school, it's programs and people, including photographs on those pages. We also will be doing quite a bit of expansion of the pages this winter and spring :-)

The library 100 years ago

This photo shows the library of 100 years ago. It was in the center section of the old Normal School building, which stood where Hartwell Hall is today. The library occupied a similar spot in Hartwell Hall for a number of years. In the early 1960s the first building designed solely for a library was built; no, not the Drake of today though! It was "Drake I," which today is Rakov, on Kenyon Street. Today's Drake Library opened in 1975.

Card Catalogs, what fun! ;-)

Remember the old card catalog? You'd have to have been here in the late 1980s, or earlier, because we switched over to an online catalog at that time. The old card catalog may seem quaint now, but just like today's online catalog it was your access to our books and other holdings.

If you knew the title or author the card catalog was easy to use, it just got a little tricky when searching by subject, because you needed to know the formal subject heading terms. With online catalogs, like the "Dynix" system we started with (and we were the first SUNY four year school to take our catalog online,) it's easier in many ways, you can do a more free form search, and pick up things more easily.

The old card catalogs represented many many hours of work to build and maintain, it was a little hard for library staff to see them go, but progress will out and we saw that the new online catalogs would serve much better.

No Internet?!

Nope, no Internet at all for the first 140 or so years of the college's history. No PCs either, and for that matter, no typewriters until late in the 1800s. (In the college archives we have many large leather bound volumes of handwritten student registers etc. from that pre-typewritten era.)

But back to the Internet. The Internet came into being in the late 196os and became accessible to colleges as time went on, via teletypes and mainframe computers. This Internet was a "net" of computers that presented information in text form, on printouts or later on monitors. The library acquired it's first "dumb" terminals connected to the Internet around 1990, but they weren't all that useful really.

There were no pictures, no web sites like we know them, certainly no Google or Wikipedia! There were search engines, "Archie" was one, but it wasn't anything like as convenient as today's Internet. The "Web," or World Wide Web, came along in the mid-90s and changed everything. This was a computing innovation that basically allowed for pictures, web pages as we know them, to run on the Internet and led to the tremendous and ongoing changes to information and it's delivery we see even today, as we experiment with Kindles and ebooks in the library.

What we did have for PCs in the early stages is shown here, ca1993. The view is on the main floor by the center staircase, looking south towards the back of the floor. (We still have a large PC cluster in this area.)  None of these PCs were connected to the Internet, and as mentioned above the Web had not yet come into being. These PC's ran a variety of CDs that held some indexes to articles (some of you will remember "ERIC",) some actual full text of articles, some government documents and so forth. One wonders what the folks 175 years from now will think of our technologies, will they seem as quaint to them as the old leather bound, handwritten volumes in the archives seem to us?