Colby as a place. Historical community of grads and current students and faculty.

Resources: special collections, Earl Smith, Marriner,

Sense of place.

For my research project, I want to produce an informative website or photo book of the history of the buildings and facilities at Colby. With the development of the new downtown dorm, athletic center and boutique hotel downtown, the scenes of campus and downtown Waterville are changing rapidly. I became initially interested in this idea after watching the videos taken on campus with Colby students and saw the same buildings that we see on the main quad today. After doing a little Google research, I found it hard to find information on the history of the buildings themselves and how Colby has grown as an institution over the years.

One interesting difference between the buildings that have been built in the past, and current projects is the source of much of the funding for those buildings. The new athletic center was funded by $100m of bonds, but all the buildings that have been here for decades, like Olin, Mudd, Keyes, Diamond, were funded by generous philanthropists and grants. I would like to explore why that is the case. The difference in sourcing of funds is an interesting, unexplored concentration that I could narrow down my project into. I want to be able to portray a larger scope of what has changed on our campus and in the town over time, while keeping my research content focused and not become overwhelmed as the scale of this project could be very large. I think a website could be a good digital medium that would allow people who are also interested in the topic to learn more, and could draw attention to this subtle change in how we fund expansions. It can also be a good way to chronologically tell a story by scrolling through from the start to the present.

I will need ITS support in creating a website that I can put all of my work on. Maybe a WordPress or a ArcGIS site would be good for this kind of project. I’m pretty familiar with HTML and have made websites before, so I think I can make this without much assistance. I will also need to meet with Special Collections to see what kind of resources and media that they have for this project. I know that they have lots of historical images, maps and other documents that could be digitized and published on my website to bring interesting material together. Also, articles in the Colby Echo could convey the voices of students from each time period. There are a variety of sources that I could explore to portray a more high level view of how things have changed over time.

I want to do this project because it is a topic that really interests me and I believe the information is not readily accessible and I intend to do so. I think the idea of a website would be useful and will last a long time. I can make the website editable so people taking ST235 in the future could go more in depth and continue what I begin.