University Archives

Tales of Minnesota’s pigskin rivalries do involve one pig. But where did that axe come from? Why a jug? And who decided on a pig made of bronze? With help from UMedia, University Archives, and Wikipedia, we tell the tales of three trophies.

The University Archives holds about 11,000 audio recordings from the University of Minnesota's radio station KUOM and other events on campus. Because they were recorded from 1939 to 1993 on reel-to-reel equipment, however, as that recording method became obsolete, these recordings were effectively silenced. Now almost 5,000 of them have been restored to audible life, through digitization.

Collecting materials about the University’s response to COVID is not only important, "It's critical," says Professor Michael T. Osterholm, Director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) at the University of Minnesota. “If we are not to repeat ourselves, we best learn from this information,” says Osterholm, an infectious-disease expert, best-selling author, frequent news source, and member of then President-elect Joe Biden's Transition COVID-19 Advisory Board. 

From 1938-1979, the Minnesota School of the Air brought educational programs into the classrooms of Minnesota and beyond over radio airwaves and through tape transcription. This episode takes listeners to Metropolitan Stadium to learn how to stay dry on a rainy day. 

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.

by Caitlin Marineau, Assistant Curator, Children's Literature Research Collections Writer, editor, and publisher Andrea Davis Pinkney presented the 2014 May Hill Arbuthnot Lecture on May...

By Daniel Necas, Archivist, Immigration History Research Center Archives An invitation to a workshop (and a kind offer by the organizers from Coventry University to...

by Tim Johnson, Curator of Special Collections & Rare Books E. W. McDiarmid Curator of the Sherlock Holmes Collections This past October one of our Friends...

by Christine Avery, Archives Assistant and Kate Hujda, Assistant Archivist/Processor As spring slowly makes its way to Minnesota, the Manuscripts Division decided it was time to take down our...

by Sara Wakefield, Reference Librarian, Immigration History Research Center Archives In the fall of 2013, the Immigration History Research Center & Archives partnered with the...

By Kate Dietrick, Assistant Archivist, Nathan and Theresa Berman Upper Midwest Jewish Archives Next week begins the Jewish holiday of Passover, or Pesach, the commemoration...

By Kris Kiesling, Director of Archives and Special Collections You never know when your day-to-day work is going to have some kind of unanticipated impact....

"What nobler purpose can there be for a University than to gather up the prizes of a culture--preserve them, propagate them, make them available--so...

If you have toured Archives and Special Collections, you know that we share an amazing facility with Minitex and the Minnesota Library Access Center....

By Christine DeZelar-Tiedman, Manager, Archives and Special Collections Metadata Unit Anyone familiar with the PBS series History Detectives knows that invariably, the show's investigators searching for...