President Hagerty establishes Drexel University Archives, 1970

   High quality PDF version of Hagerty memo

With this memo, sent by President William Walsh Hagerty to all personnel in 1970, the Drexel University Archives became an official department at Drexel.  Despite this decree, the university archives had some trouble getting off the ground.  The university archives lost its twenty square feet of original space in the Korman Center in 1986.  In a report written by part-time archivist Ann Preston in 1990, she called the new storage location for the archives "environmentally unsafe" and stated that "the basement of an old building with exposed timbers and leaking pipes is an extremely poor choice for storage of one-of-a-kind material that the University is trying to keep." 

Thirty years after its official beginning and thirteen years after being moved out of the Korman Center, the university archives received the attention it needed to carry out its mission to preserve the history of Drexel.  In 1999, dean of libraries Carol Montgomery, with much appreciated support from Drexel University president Constantine Papadakis, finally provided the university archives with a proper facility in the lower level of the Hagerty Library and hired the first full-time university archivist, Stephen Janick. 

For more information about the history of the university archives or any questions about Drexel history, please contact the university archivist at archives@drexel.edu or 215-895-1757.