New Digital Collection of Stout Student Organization Photographs!

The UW-Stout University Archives is pleased to announce a new digital collection of Stout Student Organization photographs. During the spring 2018 semester, the archives undertook a multi-step digitization project to digitize their Iconographic Series 3 collection of Student Organization photographs, ca. 1910-2000. This collection includes 870 photographs of Greek fraternities and sororities, and athletic, academic, literary, music, religious, social service, career-related, and men’s and women’s organizations. There are formal member group photographs, which many can be found in UW-Stout’s Tower yearbooks (1909-1989), and informal photographs showing activities, such as dances, field trips, picnics, concerts, homecoming activities and Greek initiations.

Stout Orchestra group photo, 1921

Stout Typographical Society Field Trip, Green Bay, WI, 1946-47

The photographs are hosted by the University of Wisconsin Digital Collections Center (UWDCC) based in Madison, Wisconsin. The UWDCC was created to help University of Wisconsin schools and other entities digitize, provide access to, and maintain digital projects. The University of Wisconsin Digitized Collections (UWDC) were established in 2001 to provide quality digital resources from it’s University of Wisconsin Academic Libraries.

UWDCC website, UW-Stout Collection page

This project represents excellent work by two Stout Archives staff members. Archives student worker Katie Hagen scanned and numbered the 870 photographs according to UWDCC guidelines. As scanning progressed, Archives Assistant Julie Hatfield started looking through each individual folder of photographs to measure each photograph, rescan any photographs if necessary, move photographs to their correct folders that were initially identified with the wrong student organization, and conduct research from information found with the photographs and within UW-Stout archival collections to properly date and identify who and what was happening in each photograph. As Julie started researching, she realized that many photographs were taken for a purpose, with many being published in The Tower yearbooks, Stoutonia student newspaper, or other Stout produced publications. She searched through The Tower yearbooks, Stoutonia, student organization collections housed in the archives, information on the UW-Stout website; and Google photos, keyword searching, and Wikipedia to help identify period clothing, people, activities, and events that were known on a state or national level.  

Stout Student Org. Photo collection, 8 boxes

Research Resources

Scanning photographs

Measuring photos

Researching for information on photograph

Researching for information on same photograph

Julie created a Metadata Excel Sheet to input all of the corresponding box, folder, object ID numbers, research information and subject headings for each photograph. From the information found on each photograph and student organization, Julie had to identify potential subject headings to be used for keyword searching on the UWDCC website. A combination of local subjects (Stout based) and Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH). It is important to keep consistent use of subject headings throughout a collection, and not use multiple variations of a group name or activity, or mix singular and plural usage. But you still need to use subject headings that will most likely be used by researchers, and sometimes that does involve the use of a singular and plural form of a word, or two names a group goes by. It depends if you know multiple names were frequently used for one group.

Metadata excel sheet

During the summer and fall of 2019, Julie refined and uploaded the metadata for each photograph into the UWDCC FileMaker Pro database. Julie sent the digital TIFF photograph files on an external hard drive to Madison through the University Red Box delivery system, for the UWDCC staff to upload into their database. The availability of the collection was delayed by upgrades to the UWDCC digital collections database, but in November 2020 the collection became publicly available online to search and browse by the UW-Stout community and beyond.

Searching the Stout Digital Collection

Example of digital photo search result

This student organization collection joins another Stout collection hosted by UWDCC featuring 500 photographs of educational activities in classrooms, shops, and laboratories.

Search and browse UW-Stout collections via the UWDCC website: https://search.library.wisc.edu/digital/AUWStout

Check out our “Campus Photographs” and other digital collections, tutorials, and library database links, on the UW-Stout Archives Digital Collections webpage:  https://library.uwstout.edu/friendly.php?s=digitalprimarysources

Tower Yearbooks (1909-1989): https://archive.org/details/toweryearbook?&sort=date