Click on history: UNMC yearbooks, photos online

College of Medicine class photo from 1913

Images from UNMC’s history provoke fond memories of students and faculty from the past. That history is now available online, just a mouse click or two away.

Digitization of materials from the library’s archives has been ongoing throughout the past year. Historical materials are available through the library’s institutional repository, DigitalCommons@UNMC.

Among the many items digitized and uploaded are 97 years of College of Medicine senior class pictures, dating from 1881 to 2013, including classes from the Omaha Medical College (forerunner of UNMC) and the University of Nebraska College of Medicine (beginning in 1902). The archives does not have a complete set of every senior class photo, with some years missing, especially from the 1910s and 1920s. Included with each class photo are the names of students (and some faculty) shown in the images. In the near future, the library hopes to digitize senior class pictures from the other colleges, including nursing, pharmacy, dentistry, and allied health professions.

The 1956 edition of the College of Nursing yearbook “Starch and Stripes.”

The digitization of yearbooks from the various colleges also has been completed in the past year. These include the College of Medicine’s “Caduceus” (1929 and 1930) and “Scope” (1948), and several years of the College of Nursing’s “Starch and Stripes” (1952-1957), as well as seven years of College of Pharmacy yearbooks (1913-1920, while the college was still located on the Lincoln campus). Additional work has been done that gives the viewer the ability to flip through the pages of each yearbook, for a rich, multimedia experience.

The library’s collections also house various years of the UNL “Cornhusker” yearbook, from 1899 through 1968, which contain sections on the schools and/or colleges of medicine, nursing, pharmacy and dentistry as they were structured before UNMC was organized in 1968. The “Cornhusker” also is available online through the archives at Love Library at UNL.

All of the work has been done to make the history of UNMC more accessible to students, faculty, alumni, friends and donors. These historical resources already have been viewed by people around the world. To see the class photos and yearbooks, visit the McGoogan Library Special Collections page here.