Welcome, Wildcats! As the campus buzzes with the excitement of a brand new semester and heralds all the sights and sounds of fall, you may find your wildcat claws tearing into the fabric of space and time around you. That’s because over 150 years of Big Blue history has accumulated in this small expanse of Lexington.
You don’t need a shovel to dig in, either. With tens of thousands of digitized photographs of campus life freely available through ExploreUK, everyone in the Wildcat community has an opportunity to dive deep into UK’s history.
Over 7,400 digitized photographs in the University of Kentucky General Photographic Prints Collection are an unparalleled resource for tracing changes in the university’s built environment and the shifting fashions, traditions, and activities of student life. The expansive collection covers the entire 20th century and is meticulously organized into hundreds of series and subseries, from athletics, grounds, and campus scenes to the now-obscure machinations of switchboard operators.
The fun doesn’t stop there: the Louis Edward Nollau F Series Photographic Print Collection (University of Kentucky) is made up of another nearly 7,000 digitized photographs taken by Louis Edward Nollau, a Professor of Engineering Drawing at UK from 1914 to 1953. The first “official” UK photographer, he photographed individuals, buildings, events, and other activities on campus during the first half of the 20th century.
A little spookily ensilvered, the University of Kentucky Glass Plate Negative Collection consists of almost 4,000 digitized dry plate, silver nitrate glass negatives. The photographs were taken by Nollau and fellow UK professors Harrison Garman and Alfred M. Peter. The majority of the collection occurs over a 20-year span, from 1898 to 1918. Along with campus life, the collection also captures scenes in and around Lexington and across the state, including parades, farms, schools, events, buildings, streets, railroads, and landscapes.
For all the people-watchers out there, the University of Kentucky Portrait Print Collection contains almost 6,000 digitized photographs of students, faculty, and administrators associated with the university from 1867 to 1995.
While these are some of the most prominent collections documenting the visual history of UK, they still barely scratch the surface. Search “University of Kentucky” on ExploreUK to find all the materials that UK Libraries has to offer concerning the past and present of the home of the Wildcats.
