Sixty years ago, NDSU President Fred Hultz presented a proposal to the North Dakota State Board of Higher Education for an institute that would inspire and provide a center for research of the region's resources and culture, encourage artistic expression of life on the plains and assist in disseminating results of significant work. H. Dean Stalling, E. A. Helgeson, Rudolph Otterson, Kenneth Kuhn, William C. Hunter, G. Ernst Gieseke and O. A. Stevens are credited with developing the idea for the institute.
On March 8, members of the NDSU community gathered to celebrate 60 years of important accomplishments made by the institute. The institute's collections comprise manuscripts, photographs, university records and artifacts and online databases. Its current activities include digitizing a range of resources and publishing. To date, the institute has added more than 2,900 separate collections and currently preserves more than 100,000 photographs.
"One of the biggest accomplishments I've seen during my tenure is when the institute obtained one of the first completed American Memory Projects from the Library of Congress," says Tom Riley, an institute director and dean of the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences.
According to Riley, the institute's publishing program has the distinction of having issued more than 100 publications, including historical works, political biographies and poetry, since its first offering "Handbook of North Dakota Plants," written by professor O. A. Stevens and published in 1950.
In partnership with Prairie Public Broadcasting and the State Historical Society of North Dakota, the institute also considers the creation of Digital Horizons, an online archives of documents, images, video and oral histories depicting life on the Northern Plains, another of their major accomplishments. "It’s a collaboration between Prairie Public Broadcasting, the Historical Society, Concordia and NDSU," said John Bye, director of the institute archives. "There are well over 20,000 objects in there right now and we're just beginning."
Michele Reid, an institute director and dean of NDSU Libraries, says they will continue making major accomplishments. "We'd like to produce more publications and we're also hoping to put together more programming opportunities. We want to work with the general public about preserving collections and family histories, and we'd like to encourage people to donate material they may have in their attic that would help preserve the history of Fargo and North Dakota. We also hope to expand our archival collections conserving the university's heritage, and to teach more public history courses in association with the history department."
Reid says they are hopeful that a new, larger main library building can be constructed in the near future that can reincorporate the institute and university archives, which are currently housed at the Skills and Technology Training Center. Bye agrees, noting an adequate facility with temperature control and humidity would create a better environment for the expanding collections.
For more information about the Institute for Regional Studies and University Archives, go to library.ndsu.edu/archives.
