The UCA Archives and Special Collections department is pleased to announce that the UCA Images collection is now available for browsing on our Digital Archives platform. This collection represents over one hundred years of UCA’s history, from its foundation as a teacher training school to the present day.
This photograph of Arkansas State Teacher’s College agriculture shows students working in the campus garden in 1915. This photograph was taken on Donaghey Avenue, looking toward the eventual location of Old Main.
As of September 2022, this collection contains 1,085 photographs of UCA history. These photographs depict not only the physical campus, but the people both past and present that make up our community. Several photographs, such as the students above, provide a glimpse into the everyday life of a student in the early days of UCA. Other photographs show previous Bears and Sugar Bears teams, graduations, and other events.
A photograph of UCA cheerleaders and band holding a pep rally in the circle in front of Old Main, c. 1960.
Our platform for the university’s digital archives, ContentDM, provides several different methods for locating photographs. Our collections can be searched by keyword, subject, or date. One unique way of searching for a photograph is searching by subject. If you were interested in historic photographs of a building on campus, you could select “buildings” as your subject and browse through the results, or you could select a particular campus building. We hope that our platform and our method of assigning subjects makes the process of browsing through the collection both useful and easy.
A photograph of Old Main taken in the winter of 1947 from the location of today’s Torreyson Library.
We anticipate that this collection will continue to grow over time. We always welcome donations of new photographs, manuscripts, and artifacts related to the history of the University of Central Arkansas. Additionally, the archives contains thousands of photographs depicting the university and its people which have not yet been processed. Although not every photograph will eventually be included in our digital collection, we will continue working diligently to preserve the history of the University of Central Arkansas and freely provide items of interest to our campus community and to the public.
Go Bears!
Daniel Klotz
UCA Archives and Special Collections