News
Librarian: Dallas Campus making history daily
DALLAS – Someday someone will write about the founding of the University of North Texas at Dallas, but according to Leora Kemp, “we want to be more than a paragraph – or even a chapter – in some other history.”
Kemp, librarian at the UNT Dallas, says she is making sure that the Campus retains enough of its memorabilia and documents to write a full-length history.
“Many, many librarians recognize the importance of historical preservation, so they try to collect whatever their buildings can hold,” Kemp said, adding that digitized preservation now makes storing documents possible in much less space.
She began collecting materials for a future history project in 2000 when she joined the staff. She said someone in a committee meeting claimed they were unable to find information about the Dallas Campus in Denton. “At that moment, a ‘campus historian’ was born,” she said.
Today, she devotes much of her time to collecting every news story, press release, video and special “oversized items” pertaining to the Campus and its development. She keeps this daily history in catalogued, three-ring binders in the library.
In reality, Kemp’s goal is to preserve more than the history of the Dallas Campus. She wants organizations and community associations in the area to regard the Campus as a repository for their historical collections as well, as soon as the space is available.
“Because I’ve been a part of this new university almost since the day it opened, and because my own history is tied to this area of Dallas County, I get a great deal of satisfaction out of this kind of historical perspective. When we’re finally able to display much of this for the public to see, I’ll be like a proud mother, knowing I helped to bring it together.”
For more information on the historical items already in the possession of the Campus historian, go to www.unt.edu/unt-dallas/HistoryIndex.pdf.
The UNT Dallas Campus operates under the authority of the University of North Texas in Denton, the state’s fourth largest university, and is a component institution of the University of North Texas System. The Campus currently offers junior-, senior- and graduate-level courses leading to bachelor’s and master’s degrees. The Campus will become freestanding and open as UNT Dallas, the city’s first and only public university, by 2010.
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