Case study: Preserving and sharing a school’s rich history

Editor’s note: this post was updated to include current information about Artstor’s platform for public collections.

Nursing Program Students, 1949. Courtesy of Santa Rosa Junior College Archives.

At the end of 1917, the Federated Home & School Association of Santa Rosa sent a recommendation to the local Board of Education to form a junior college. The following fall, Santa Rosa Junior College offered its first classes at the Santa Rosa High School. Its student body numbered only 19, with eight educators. It would take another 13 years before the College could boast a faculty of its own.

Today, in the College’s ninth decade, SRJC numbers more than 22,000 students and some 1,000 faculty members across five campus locations. Its nursing and dental students consistently rank first in state for their high passing rate in state examinations.

1985 Commencement Ceremony. Courtesy of Santa Rosa Junior College Archives.

Such a rich history demands to be preserved and remembered. Amy Malaise, the archivist at SRJC’s Doyle Library, has started to tackle the job. So far she has cataloged hundreds of photographs from the 1920s to today on JSTOR Forum, and is making them available to Santa Rosa Junior College students, faculty, and the world at large in Artstor’s public collections.

“We were looking for a Web-based solution that would have sophisticated features such as customizable cataloging screens, user-defined permissions, and support of multimedia files without drawing on the resources of a thinly stretched campus infrastructure team,” explained Alicia Virtue, Dean of Learning Resources. “Shared Shelf [now JSTOR Forum] allowed a small technical services team led by Paula Burks and Eve Miller to quickly deploy a much needed digital media management solution. The enhanced image discovery made available through Shared Shelf allows the library to bring unique and specialized collections to a much larger community audience.”