Preserving our past

By Megan Bradshaw on August 15, 2018

Every year, Towson University holds a service awards breakfast to honor faculty and staff for their years of dedication to the university.

The number of individuals honored decreases as the decades of experience recognized mounts, but each year there are faculty and staff honored for 30, 40, 45 and even 50 years of service.

“Students graduate in cycles, but often the same faculty remains through generations of students,” said Don Forester, former TURFA president and professor emeritus in the Department of Biological Services, part of the Jess & Mildred Fisher College of Science and Mathematics.

Even after many decades of service, TU faculty and staff are eager to remain active members of the community after retirement. Many do so as members of the TU Retired Faculty Association (TURFA), an initiative supported by the Office of the Provost, to foster an ongoing relationship between retired faculty/librarians, the university and the community.

To capture the institutional memory developed by those long-serving faculty, Forester and fellow TURFA members decided to start the Oral History Project. The project committee consists of Forester; Fran Bond, the current TURFA president; Ellie Hofstetter, a former librarian; and Peggy Benner, a former Reading Clinic staff member.

They worked to film the interviews of Howard Erickson, a biological sciences professor who began teaching in 1959; Henry Chen, a physics professor who started in 1964; and Doris Lidtke, a mathematics and computer science professor hired in 1968.

After the videos are produced, they will be stored in the University Archives and Special Collections, overseen by Ashley Todd Diaz.

According to Diaz, only a small percentage of archives the university stores is audio/visual. TURFA’s oral history project is just the second undertaken after a teacher education project spearheaded by College of Education professors. 

Storing A/V archives is surprisingly challenging. One would think storing boxes of paper would present more of an obstacle, but Diaz explained that the file size of audio and video and the number of formats required for viewing makes preserving A/V archives more difficult.

“But the plus is an interaction level much higher than that of print materials,” she said. “It is more engaging to use materials that have an A/V component. We’ve become such a digital culture, and students from now on will be much more familiar with digital materials.”

The College of Liberal Arts is next on the committee’s radar. The members identify likely candidates, develop questions and fund raise to pay for the video production.