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Once again, Dakota Days has come. Though the festivities have begun early in the week, the parade is still an exciting highlight of Game Day. A screaming sea of red and white converges upon the Dome to cheer the Coyotes to victory. One lucky girl is crowned Miss Dakota. In the evening, merry USD students […]

Lately I have been assigned to the exciting task of carefully vacuuming books and wiping the shelves clean in the Chilson collection. It is a task that would be boring if there weren’t so many interesting books on every shelf. I’ve been working my way through beautifully illustrated Native American children’s books, histories of Wounded […]

Well, all of the University Herbarium specimens collected by W.H. Over have been photographed and put back into their proper folders/cabinets. Altogether, we photographed 1,154 specimens! Now we are working on metadata and digital specifications in order to upload the photos, batch by batch, onto the Digital Library of South Dakota. We’ll start the upload […]

William Henry Over was a natural historian who lived in Vermillion from 1913 to 1956. While in Vermillion, he served first as the Assistant Curator and then full Curator for the University Museum. He studied numerous subjects relating to the natural world, including botany; however, until recently, little was known about Over’s work with plants. […]

Last Friday, Doris and I were sent out into the world with an expensive camera as a part of a class that Sarah was teaching about using said expensive camera. It was daunting, mostly because I’m really clumsy so I was afraid of dropping and breaking the camera, but also exciting because I had never […]

Today we got a lesson in photography. Sarah, the digitization and photographs associate at USD, taught us how to use the Archives’ Pentax digital camera to take high-resolution photographs for our student projects. She introduced us to the camera and helped us figure out everything from changing the lens cover to setting the light manually. We struggled at first but, […]

This article, published in Volume 7 of The Volante (Issue 3, December 1893, pp. 41-42), poetically describes the personal and philosophical significance of photography. The author E. Frank Peterson explains that as “we gaze upon that faded picture we forget our present environments, we live again in the blissful past, and again we pluck the […]

Short poem printed in the May 1892 issue of The Volante.