Historical State Web Site Provides Easy Time Travel into NC State's Past

Media Contact:
dwhiscoe , NCSU Libraries, (919) 513-3425

The North Carolina State University Libraries today released an enhanced version of its Historical State web site to make it even easier for students, scholars, alumni, and the community to explore and enjoy the history, personalities, and culture of NC State University.

The University Archives in the NCSU Libraries' Special Collections Research Center holds a vast array of documents, photos, audio files and other historical materials from the founding of the school up through the present. Historical State has been available for some time to provide a digital window into everything from the Model T's lined up outside Riddick Field during its construction in 1933, to a 1950 recording of the Alma Mater, to photos of the 1955 cheerleading squad, to the 1968 undergraduate catalog.

Since the site delivers such a unique accumulation of material about the University ”information that is invaluable to scholars and fascinating to alumni and to North Carolinians in general ”we have now improved the return on investment for the collection by providing easier, more attractive accessibility to users. The new version of the site provides powerful, easy-to-use search and discovery to open up the rich legacy of NC State University.

According to Greg Raschke, associate director for collections and scholarly communication at the Libraries, as the official repository for the university, our archives have mountains of incredibly interesting material about the history of NC State; this new tool gives us a great way to extend the reach of these materials and to give our donors and the people of North Carolina even more value for the history we collect for them. 

The site now brings together ”under a single architecture ”a diverse set of historical resources, including digitized images, course catalogs, and yearbooks; historic timelines, narratives, and online exhibits; and catalog records of books about NC State University. Patrons can use Historical State to explore the development of campus buildings, student life, athletics, and the academic colleges and departments.

In addition, the site's new search allows patrons to search for specific names, dates, and events. This is particularly useful with items such as course catalogs and student yearbooks, where access to information at the page level is required. Users can search seamlessly across the collection and then limit results, through facets, by type, collection, subject, genre, geographic location, and decade. An integrated page turner  further adds value to these resources, allowing users to easily page through an entire catalog or yearbook. The full text of course catalogs and yearbooks are searchable to allow users to pinpoint pages containing search terms.

The site also features a comments function that allows visitors to leave their reactions and share memories, furthering the value and interest for the whole community. Users can also chat in real time with reference staff.

The new Historical State is being released as part of this year's Founders Day activities at NC State. The Special Collections Research Center is also providing the historical photos and materials for another innovative digital time machine  that makes it easy to explore the NC State campus and its history. On Founders Day, the NCSU Libraries' is also launching the new WolfWalk mobile campus tour . WolfWalk is an innovative tool that allows users with mobile devices to give themselves a self-guided historical walk through NC State's main campus. Using location awareness technology on users' smartphones, it detects their current location and then delivers a tour of nearby buildings and other historically interesting locations at NC State.