Building a Virtual University of the Past: Archives and Electronic Media in the 21st Century

Stephen Vaughn
Professor
University of Wisconsin, Madison

Modern technology gives us the ability to create a virtual archive that could capture the intellectual life of the university for any given year in an unprecedented way. Yet vital information that might be of great value to future generations is often not being collected, and what is collected faces the prospect of rapid deterioration and inaccessibility because the technology with which it was created has become obsolete. Several generations of important research are in danger of being lost or seriously imperiled.

At the University of Wisconsin, the School of Journalism and Mass Communication has created an electronic archive that makes the Schoolís history much more accessible to students, faculty, and alumni. Future goals include adding additional J-School records to this archive, connecting the archive to the archival holdings of other departments on campus, and eventually building a network of departmental and faculty archives with many other universities.