The Tripod

This summer, Trinity College completed a year-long undertaking: digitizing The Trinity Tripod's archives. The archives, which were previously contained as copies of Tripod back issues stored in the College Library or as plain text on the Tripod's Web site (www.trinitytripod.com), are now available on the Library's Web site in .pdf format, accessible to all students, faculty and staff.

The online archive contains a search function, allowing users to input keywords to find particular articles, and issues can be viewed by year (1960-2008) as well. Trinity is the second college in Connecticut to digitize its newspaper archives, Yale University being the first this past May.

This manner of archiving the Tripod is convenient for a number of reasons. The search engine eliminates the need to randomly click about on the Tripod Web site or sift through back issues in hopes of happening upon your preferred topic or article. The .pdf representations also show the stylistic evolution of the newspaper, letting readers see firsthand how the layout has changed over the last 48 years.

However, these are not the only changes the new archives will preserve. Being able to search for certain terms - "campus safety," perhaps, or "president" - will allow users to see how Trinity College has evolved over the years and how students have dealt with campus challenges, such as the fight for coeducation or the cry for better campus security. Some of the most compelling events in our nation's history occurred between the years of 1960 and 2008, and the archives will make it easier for users to see how students responded to events like President Kennedy's assassination in 1963, the Watergate scandal in 1972, or the 1986 Challenger explosion.

"You can trace certain threads of debate that have happened on campus, and find insight on how the campus reacted to various world events," said Trinity Music and Performing Arts Librarian Amy Harrell.

While this new system will clearly prove useful to current Tripod staff members, students who are currently facing issues others have in the past - lobbying for changes in campus food options, for example - can use the Tripod archives as a resource to see what worked or did not in protesting for change.

The project, which took a year's worth of planning and work, involved scanning the pages of every Tripod issue at Innovative Document Imaging (IDI) in East Brunswick, NJ. College Archivist and Special Collection Librarian, Peter Knapp '65, supervised and conducted quality control inspections, and Catalog Librarian Lynn Fahy uploaded the files to the Library's publicly-accessible image database.

The issues from 1960 to 2008 were chosen due to their frequency of use and concerns about the deterioration of newsprint. Should the Tripod archives become a well-used resource, the Library will consider archiving other College publications in a similar manner.

The archives can be accessed at http://library.trincoll.edu/tripod.htm.

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