Connecticut Connections: Historical College Scrapbooks from Connecticut College, Trinity College, and Wesleyan University

About this project

In Fall 2016, Connecticut College, Trinity College, and Wesleyan University - three liberal arts colleges from the Connecticut River Valley and Connecticut shoreline region - came together to pilot a collaborative digital project. Although our institutions are geographically dispersed, we shared a desire to leverage our resources and expertise to explore what each institution could do beyond its individual capacity. Ultimately, the goal of this project was to develop shared standards, resources, and processes, and to use this knowledge as a base from which to explore future collaborative digital projects.

Each school chose a scrapbook from its collections that reflected the student experience and campus life of a particular era: from Trinity College, the scrapbook of Philip DeWitt Phair, Class of 1894; from Wesleyan University, the scrapbook of Lynn Smith Miller, Class of 1914; and from Connecticut College, the scrapbook of Linda Lee Abel, Class of 1969. These books provide an intimate perspective into the lives of Connecticut’s college students over the course of a century, from the rigors of classes and examinations to the challenges of balancing school and social lives. 

This exhibition was created using Scalar, an open source platform developed by the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture. To navigate to each scrapbook, click on the link at the bottom of each introductory essay.

Trinity College: Philip DeWitt Phair Scrapbook 
Wesleyan University: Pre-WWI Student Life at Wesleyan: The Lynn Smith Miller Scrapbook 
Connecticut College: Capturing the 1960s: The Linda Lee Abel Scrapbook