ANTICIPATING THE INAUGURATION next week of Dr. Ann McElaney-Johnson, our 12th president, I've been assembling historic photos from the inaugurations of Nos. 9, 10 and 11: Sister Magdalen Coughlin (1976), Sister Karen Kennelly (1990) and Dr. Jacqueline Powers Doud (2000).
Before Sister Magdalen's, inaugurations must have been quiet handoffs among the CSJs, because there are absolutely no photos to be found. I found several of Sisters Magdalen and Karen but I came up empty for Dr. Doud. Uh-oh, I thought... they're digital. I don't receive digital photos in the archives and have no easy way to keep them if I did.
After a fruitless search of hard disks in the PR office, I was starting to get thoroughly depressed when I walked over to a stack of old binders I knew had negatives and contact sheets from PR in the '90s. Miracle! Eight sheets of jewel-like color slides - not labeled, of course, but easy to squint at and identify. I had 20 digitized at DVD Your Memories in Culver City and will add them to the display.
I chatted with the DVD-YM technician about the period of transition we're in between fully paper and fully digital photography. It makes archives a major challenge. The former are fragile, but the latter disappear if you're not paying attention.
My colleague Pia Orense and I now know that PR has digital photography almost exclusively after 2001. That means these slides of Dr. Doud's inaugural on Oct. 17, 2000, are among the very last of the physical images in the College.
We have a lot of work ahead if we're going to keep them around through three more inaugurals.