February 5, 2020

The Drexel University Archives recently began adding digitized issues of several Drexel yearbooks to iDEA, Drexel’s digital repository.

Archives staff digitized yearbooks already in the public domain first so that researchers can publish or reproduce images from these works freely without seeking approval from the University.

Most of the yearbooks currently available in iDEA were published before 1926 (and thus already in the public domain), while others were published without a copyright notice (like the Evening College's yearbooks from the 1930s-1950s).

Currently, issues from three different Drexel yearbooks are digitized and freely available online to the Drexel community

• The Lexerd: The yearbook covering all aspects of Drexel University. First published in 1913 and still published today.

• The Record: The yearbook of the Department of Engineering in the early 1900s, when Drexel was still the Drexel Institute of Art, Science, and Industry.

• The Spartan: The yearbook of Drexel's Evening College in the mid-20th century. The Evening College exists today as Goodwin College. 

Gems found in these issues include: 

• The gently jovial bios for each student found in the 1912 Record ("Though we have never found out where Seyffert lives, we imagine that it is a place where the trains always leave ten minutes late.")

• The foreword to the 1942 Spartan that straightforwardly addresses "the ominous presence of War" and refers to WWII as a "War of Machines" but also "the War of Production."

• A song about dating a Drexel girl (from the 1924 Lexerd):

My girl's a hullabaloo;
She goes to Drexel, too;
She wears the gold and blue,
I tell to you. 

[Chorus] 

And in my future life
She's going to be my wife. 
How in the world did you find that out?
She told me so. 

She goes to all the games;
I furnish all the change
For her and all the dames 
That go too. 

When she grows older
She will grow bolder,
And I will hold her
Head on my shoulder. 

Archives staff have made it a priority to create fully searchable digital versions of these print yearbooks, and they applied OCR (optical character recognition) software to all digitized issues so readers can search the text within the yearbooks directly in their web browsers. Like all other materials in iDEA, the yearbooks are also downloadable. 

Over the next year, Archives staff plan to add more digitized yearbook issues to the repository. Meanwhile, the entire physical yearbook collection is always available in the Archives reading room, located in the lower level of W. W. Hagerty Library. If you're interested in seeing a yearbook  that isn't available in iDEA, please email your friendly archivists at archives@drexel.edu. We hope you enjoy delving into Drexel’s history through these unique digital items!   

For more information about the Drexel University Archives or iDEA, visit https://www.library.drexel.edu/archives/overview/ or contact archives@drexel.edu