From 1910-1983, Shepherd University students published a yearbook, The Cohongoroota. There yearbooks were not, however, published between 1916-19 and 1930-48 due to financial restrictions. The goal of this project has been to make some of these gems more accessible to the Shepherd community while also creating a space for exploration into student life, past and present.

Instead of trying to tell every story found within the pages of The Cohongoroota, we have selected a handful of yearbooks from different years in order to present a taste of how things such as social organizations as well as overall thematic content of the yearbooks changed on Shepherd’s campus over time. In order to do this, we have provided a timeline of events relevant to yearbook production as a way to provide contextual information for the rest of the project. We also used Meta Slider as a way to show visually how Shepherd’s campus and students have changed over the years. We hope that this project will spark a renewed interest in the history of Shepherd University, and make The Cohongoroota more accessible to students past and present.

This project is part of the Spring 2017 COPLACDigital course, the Social Life of Books. The course website can be found here. Throughout the course, students from seven campuses learned about how books have lives of their own, and how to tell the stories of those books digitally.