CARLI Digitized Book of the Month – June 2015

The Eagle (1971)

Ah, summer. On the surface, campus activity seems to slow to a crawl. A few faculty and students remain on campus for summer courses, but you can park closer to campus now, and you no longer worry about someone taking “your” favorite seat for eating lunch.

But in the library, summer is project time. These precious months are spent on activities such as assessing collections, revising documentation and performing upgrades to essential services.

In 1971, the library at St. Procopius College was engaged in such a project. The photo above shows Fr. Robert Buday in the process of transferring the library’s collection of vinyl records to….magnetic tape.

Oh, Fr. Robert. Don’t you know that vinyl is in again?

Insert your favorite rant about technical obsolescence here, but let this photo serve as a sober reminder that, perhaps, some of the projects we work on this summer may seem similarly laughable to our successors in 40 years. History repeats itself.

This photo appears in the 1971 volume of The Eagle yearbook from St. Procopius College. St. Procopius College was founded in 1887 by the Benedictine monks of St. Procopius Abbey. Today the school is Benedictine University in Lisle, IL.

Written by Alice Creason, Systems/Digital Collections Librarian, Lewis University

This volume was contributed by the Benedictine University. You can find this volume and others from CARLI participant libraries in the Internet Archive.