Special Collections and Archives

Prior to 2020, the Friends Collection and College Archive's digital collections were housed in a database called CONTENTdm. After 2020 we started uploading them to a different site called Hyku. Anything digitized prior to 2020 is in CONTENTdm, and anything digitized going forward will be uploaded to Hyku.

We realize having two different sites makes it harder for our patrons to find items in our digital collections. Therefore we are working on connecting all of the digital collections on both sites directly to their finding aids, which can be found here. It is a work in progress.

In addition, over the years there were special projects that digitized portions of various collections, usually on thematic lines. For example, the Plowshares Digital Archive for Peace Studies and the Earlham Newspaper Project. To make these special projects easier to find, we've linked them to this page as well.

The Earlham College student newspaper has been active since 1911. The first weekly newspaper was named the Earlham Press, using that name until 1926 when it was renamed the Quaker Quill. The Quill was of short duration, only holding this name until 1931. The new student newspaper was dubbed “The Earlham Post.” This name lasted for more than fifty years, not changing its name again until 1986, when it became known as the “The Earlham Word”, or just “The Word”.

The student newspaper includes articles about Earlham's sports teams, important dates, guest speakers, and the crime beat. It is deeply involved in documenting the college's happenings, helping keep both the Earlham and Richmond community informed. In more recent years it has been entirely online with no print edition.

Bethany Theological Seminary is pleased to include among its educational assets an unusually valuable library of rare books now numbering 5462 volumes. Three distinct collections make up the holdings: the Abraham Cassel Collection of theological works, the William Eberly Collection of hymnals, and the Ora Huston Collection of English Bibles. The physical copies of the books are located in the Earlham Friends Collection and College Archives, but digital items can be found using the link below.

The Image Database to Enhance Asian Studies [IDEAS] successfully unified digitizing efforts at multiple campuses into a shared interdisciplinary, pan-Asian searchable database. Focusing on the generally underrepresented area of Asia, IDEAS makes multi-media materials available for specialists and non-specialists alike.

Started initially as a collaboration between The Colorado College, Earlham College, Lake Forest College, and St. Olaf College, the collection has grown to include contributions from over 30 liberal arts institutions.

Plowshares was part of a larger project funded by the Lilly Endowment for collaboration by Goshen, Manchester, and Earlham as the three historic peace-church colleges in Indiana. The libraries made available materials on-line useful for the study of peace and justice.

Early publications resembling yearbooks included Fond Recollections (1891-?), Class of Ninety-Six (1896), and The Earlhamite Annual (1902, 1907-1908). Consecutive annuals began in 1906. with the publication of the Sargasso (1906, 1909-2008). The last print edition was made in 2002.  It was released on DVD from 2003-2008 without a print version. The yearbooks were not made after 2008. Some of the Sargassos have been digitized.

The Peripheral Manuscripts Project is hosted at Indiana University Bloomington and was generously supported by a 2020 Council on Library and Information Resources Hidden Collections grant and two grants from Indiana University: a Grant-in-Aid from the Office of the Vice Provost of Research and a Bridge Funding grant from the Office of the Vice President of Research. The project sought to bring attention to important medieval manuscripts in the American Midwest using a consortium model that included twenty-two institutional collaborators. Earlham College and Bethany Theological Seminary's manuscripts were included in the project.