Charlie Williams (BA, ‘19) and Courtney Thompson (MA, ‘20) are student assistants in Special Collections and Archives. They curated an exhibit on Homecoming traditions through Cal Poly’s past. The original exhibit was placed on the second floor of Kennedy Library and…
Halloween is upon us, so we’ve dug up some spooky (and a few not-so-spooky) books in Special Collections and Archives to set the tone. Everything previewed below, plus a few extra titles, are available at Special Collections and Archives on the…
Libraries represent different things to different people, but at the core of their mission, they are a means by which people gain access to knowledge. That’s one reason Kennedy Library has implemented Textbook Match, a program designed to lower costs…
Every October we celebrate California Archives Month, part of the national American Archives Month, a collaborative effort by archivists and repositories across the nation to highlight the importance of archival records. Learn more about California Archives Month here. Special Collections and Archives…
Can you imagine? “Ride high, mules!” Well, neither can we here at Special Collections and Archives. Be glad that the Class of 1925 determined the mustang a better fit for their mascot. Cal Poly, established in 1901, did not have a…
At the Fall Convocation, which took place on September 13th, 2018, six faculty members were awarded the Learn by Doing Scholar award. They are honored for their contributions to Cal Poly’s signature pedagogy, Learn by Doing. This award is an…
It’s mid-September, that energetic time when thousands of students return to San Luis Obispo after the summer break. Here’s a look back at campus living since the first move-in in 1903. Cal Poly’s first on-campus living Dormitory Row Three more dorms were added…
Charlie Williams (HIST ’19) is a student assistant in Special Collections and Archives. Here she looks a variety of sources from the University Archives that were all created to capture a single event in Cal Poly’s history. “What is it like…
I recently read two very different novels centered in the world of visual art. Tom Rachman’s The Italian Teacher begins in 1950s Rome, and at first focuses on a bigger-than-life artist, Bear Bavinsky. Bear personifies the worst of the egotistical…