Maybe it’s because I like history. Maybe it’s because all the blogging makes me appreciate archives and being able to search them at any time. In any case, this seems rather cool.
Last week, the University of Pittsburgh launched Documenting Pitt, a digital archive of more than 70,000 pages of text and images: course catalogs, chancellors’ reports, yearbooks, commencement programs, fact books, football and basketball media guides and hundreds of photographs of students, staff and buildings. It’s all searchable at digital.library.pitt.edu/d/documentingpitt/.
There’s some overlap with another digital Pitt archive on the City of Pittsburgh.
I could see spending a lot of time looking around these sites.
My favorite pic though was the one taken from the roof of the Cathedral looking towards Homestead in May 1962. Forbes Field in the foreground, and a massive, hulking, smoke-spewing expanse of industry in the background along the Mon that is completely foreign to me… even though the picture was only taken eight years before I was born. It still freaks me out sometimes how different Pittsburgh used to be.
Speaking of pissing off Penn State and spewing, did anybody else catch Beano Cook’s epic blast at Penn State over Anthony Morelli this weekend? Transferred to Penn State because at big, state, land grant schools like that, it’s easier to hide somebody like Morelli in “hotel and resturant management” or some other “bogus” major? Even if I didn’t entirely agree with Beano, I thought it was hillariously incindiary material.
I went through some of the Pitt yearbooks for a little more clarity on what Pitt’s past football success was like.
Awesome pics and write-ups, several mentions of “mythical national championships” as well as shots of Forbes Field, and Pitt Stadium.
If you go to look at the yearbooks use the index, it will save you a lot of time.
Hail to Pitt!