Librarians of the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections housed in Kroch Library are hard at work cataloguing more than 50 years of WVBR records that were donated by the student-run radio station Monday. The records — compiled by students and alumni — are documentation of the station’s history, chronicling things from a news broadcast of the Kent State shooting to WVBR’s switch from classical music to rock radio.

The project was initiated last April by an alumnus who found the original transcripts of WVBR’s report on the historic Willard Straight Hall Takeover in his personal files. His desire to donate them for the 40th anniversary of the event pushed WVBR to compile records held by other alumni and sort through the material housed in its offices. Mike Beyman ’10, WVBR’s current vice president for public relations, said that the donation of the transcripts sparked his interest to transfer “everything from as early as I could find up until we moved out of our old studio location” to the University archives. “We have a lot of Cornell information that’s tied up with WVBR,” Beyman said.

Compiling the material that was presented to the archives last Monday was a lengthy task. “The records before we had transferred them were in a few filing cabinets in the back of our basement … we hadn’t touched them in years,” Beyman said. “They really hadn’t been opened until we decided to look into it,” he continued. “Over the summer I started figuring out how we would go about [transferring the materials]. Probably a good month in September was just [spent] pulling these things out ... and trying to sort them in some sort of rudimentary fashion.”

Another challenge that WVBR faced in pulling together its records from the last half century was preserving the quality of its old audio recordings as they are made accessible to modern-day technology. Many of the oldest recordings in the collection are very fragile, described by Beyman as “a step below scotch tape.” By working with the University archives, WVBR hopes to transfer the sound from the delicate tapes to a digital format so that they can still be heard and appreciated.

WVBR is not the only student organization with historical materials housed in the University archives. The archives also hold the records of campus sororities, fraternities and honorary societies, as well as material relating to Cornell athletics, the Big Red Band and many documents relating to The Sun’s own history. The Rare and Manuscript division of the library, which houses the University archives as well as an extensive collection of original documents from a wide variety of areas, holds in total an estimated one million photographs. Its entire collection accounts for over 31 miles of shelving.

“This is going to be a great resource,” said Elaine Engst, director of rare and manuscript collections and University archivist, in regards to the donation. She added that the records show “what was going on not from any filtered perspective, but from the direct student perspective.”

“We’re really delighted by this,” Engst continued by describing the diversity and the wide scope of the records available to students. “Our collections really relate to the whole range of human knowledge,” Engst said.

Evan Earle ’02, a collections assistant who worked closely with WVBR during the transfer, stressed the availability and accessibility of the Rare and Manuscript library. “In terms of using the material, we love to show it to people,” Earle said. Both archivists also encouraged students to check out the unique holdings in the Rare and Manuscript library for themselves. “It’s well used,” Earle said, but added “I think a lot of people aren’t realizing when they’re walking … between Goldwin Smith and Stimson, they’re walking over some of the greatest treasures the University has to offer.”