By Kelsey Kendall
In the early 1960s, ϲ was just taking shape. After years of being an extension of William & Mary, it was renamed Old Dominion College. The school had just adopted blue as its official color, and its new mascot was the Monarchs. The student newspaper had also changed its name from The High Hat to The Mace & Crown – a change that reflected the more regal identity Old Dominion was taking on.
Much of what happened during those major changes was chronicled in Mace & Crown in a newsroom in Webb Center filled with typewriters that would slowly be replaced by computers, paste-up boards replaced by design software and a revolving door of students contributing to the publication.
Now, more than 60 years of ϲ’s history – as reported by its students – are archived digitally through allowing those searching the database to use the publication as a primary source and getting a glimpse of what life at the University was like all those years ago.
Jessica Ritchie, head of special collections and university archives, said preserving this bit of ϲ history had been on the Libraries’ wish list for a long time. The project was made possible through a series of donations from Margo Horner, who graduated in 1973, which allowed the University to work with a vendor that specializes in digitizing archival material.
The searchable database allows anyone to see these past issues from wherever they are in the world.
“We are fortunate that Ms. Horner and the Libraries share a common goal of pursuing digital projects that make the unique collections of ϲ widely accessible, preserve and diversify the historical record, and promote the unique history of the university,” Ritchie said.
Horner, who received her master’s in history at ϲ, said it was important to her to give back to the University when she could – especially when it comes to preserving history. Her fond memories and relationships with the institution and the history professors were the inspiration behind her giving. Her goal in helping digitize the student newspaper was to allow students and other researchers the opportunity to look back.
“To me, it’s the connection to history,” Horner said.
Current Editor Gabriel Cabello Torres found the experience of seeing the work done before him “surreal.” He saw the shifts in writing styles through the years and the way some news events seem to repeat themselves in a way. He and his predecessors going back decades covered similar news events and issues.
“We’re all just contributing to this huge, huge tree of the past, present and future,” Cabello Torres said.
Frank Sayles, Jr. graduated from ϲ in 1977. He had been involved with Mace & Crown since the first weeks he was on campus, starting with advertising layout and contributing stories and working his way up to editor-in-chief by his last year. Now the editor and publisher of an online news outlet in Georgia, Sayles said the Mace was where he got experience in putting together a newspaper from start to finish.
He remembered the days he and his colleagues would put together the paper – then a weekly newspaper. They wrote their stories on typewriters and would physically lay out the copy to design the pages, a method known as paste-up.
They would have the paper ready to put on a bus to Elizabeth City, North Carolina to print over the weekend. By Monday, they were distributing the paper around campus.
At that time, those stories and pages were not saved online for him to reflect on. They largely lived in storage wherever someone thought to save them or at the ϲ Libraries. With the digitization, Sayles’ work from about 45 years ago is readily available online.
“I had forgotten some of these stories that we had and some of the things I actually covered,” Sayles said. “It’s really good to look at it again and see it. I think we made an impact at the time.”
For each issue of Mace & Crown, which is now published semesterly as a news magazine, Cabello Torres and the other student journalists work in Webb Center to write, edit and design the publication. It is done on computers now, and though some things stay the same, he imagines the students working on the paper more than half a century ago would never have thought of the publication would come to cover, such as video games or other 21st century technologies.
But what stayed the same was the effort to cover arts and culture, political activism, musicians coming to campus and athletics, recording the student voice on campus to inform and share their perspectives about the University and the community.
For Cabello Torres, the digital archive is a chance to see student perspectives from years ago, conduct research for upcoming articles and gain inspiration.
For Sayles, it is a reminder of the work that kicked off his career in the ever-changing field of journalism.