From the Archivist

Fifty years ago this month the new Washington Avenue Bridge opened to connect the main campus and the then newly established West Bank campus. The bridge opened to pedestrian traffic on its upper deck on September 27, 1965 and automobile traffic began on October 4.

Leave it to an archivist to notice an unexplained detail in the current Andersen Library exhibit, Exploring Minnesota’s Natural History, curated by University Archives. At an exhibit event in July a colleague inquired of the co-curators, “Is there a reason why the words in the Henry Nachtrieb letter are spelled in such an interesting way?”

The University Archives is the repository of the C. Walton Lillehei papers, a collection of materials that document Lillehei’s entire professional career as a cardiac surgeon. The Open Heart Project, a six-month effort to identify and make materials in this unprocessed collection accessible to the public for research, has uncovered primary sources that question the often repeated narrative of the invention of the battery-powered pacemaker.

University Archives recently completed scanning thousands of images of unique botanical, zoological, and geological materials that document Minnesota’s natural history. The materials – which relate to the establishment of the Minnesota Geological and Natural History Survey in 1872 – include photographs of birds, moose, landscapes, wildflowers, and more. The scanned images are now available to the public on the University Libraries UMedia website.

March 25 would have been Norman E. Borlaug's 100th birthday. The Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and University of Minnesota alumnus (B.S. ‘37, M.S. ‘39, Ph.D. ‘42), is called the father of the Green Revolution. His personal papers are housed in University of Minnesota Archives in the Elmer L. Andersen Library.

On January 6, 1928, former President William Watts Folwell appeared before the Board of Regents and shared a piece of correspondence he had written to...