Alumni Office Public Records

This collection is no longer planned for ingest into ACDC as part of the Bicentennial Project. 

In January 2019, roughly half-way through the Bicentennial Project, we assessed what we had done so far and what more we could do within our timeline. On account of this assessment, we removed 7 collections/portions of collections from our list of those we planned to complete by the end of the project (August 2020). This collection is one of those removed. We chose to remove this collection and prioritize others instead for several reasons:

  1. We originally had added this portion of a collection thinking it would be fairly easy to complete within our timeline since we had already imaged these minutes per a request of the Alumni & Parent Programs office, though we had not created metadata for them or added them to ACDC. However, on later evaluation, we realized that the minutes we had imaged were only a small selection of minutes within the collection, and they spanned several different series or subseries and did not provide a meaningful representative selection.
  2. Upon further evaluation of the archival collection and finding aid, Archives & Special Collections determined that this collection needs re-processing and updates to the finding aid before ingest into ACDC. We had not accounted for this step in determining the feasibility of this portion of a collection previously.
  3. All in all, though this is a valuable collection that will be reprocessed and receive updated finding aid description some time in the future, we determined that it is not a top bicentennial priority for us at this time. If we should make it available in ACDC in the future, we would like to do so at a time when we can give it the proper attention, project planning, and description it deserves in keeping with our high quality standards.
  4. Also, this collection may benefit highly from enhancements to ACDC that we hope to be able to provide in the future, such as OCRd text and full-text searching capabilities. Such enhancements, however, will not be completed by our Bicentennial Project end date and are on hold until we complete a repository systems migration.

Collection Overview page completed before removing this portion of a collection from the Bicentennial Project:

The Alumni Office Public Records document the active work of the Alumni Council, the Society of the Alumni, and the Alumni Association on behalf of Amherst College over much of the 20th century (1922-1992).  The Society’s work includes fundraising, events for alumni, parents, and community, and general support for the growth and development of the College as a whole. The records contain correspondence, committee and general meeting minutes, printed material, and other administrative records relating to capital campaigns and other financial support, as well as to events such as reunions and alumni weekends, parents’ programs, and alumni travel programs.

Page from the 1924 - 1948 ledger of minutes of the Executive Committee of the Alumni Council
Page from the 1924 – 1948 ledger of minutes of the Executive Committee of the Alumni Council

For the Bicentennial, we will be digitizing the meeting minutes from the Society of the Alumni. The digitized material will provide an overview of the substantial changes for Amherst College over the past century, including coeducation, increased diversity among alumni, students, faculty, and staff, and major curriculum changes. The minutes also document alumni contributions to long-range planning for the College over time, and reflect alumni ideas and responses to the College’s growth and change over the years.

This collection is scheduled to be digitized and described during Year Two (2019) of the Bicentennial project.

For more information
Related Bicentennial Collections