Woodstock West Exhibit
by
Aaliyah Jones WRIT 1733: Honors Writing | Professor Robert Gilmor
CURATOR’S NOTE: MY PIECE IS A DIGITAL EXHIBIT CREATED for “WRIT 1733: Stories from the Archives” in the Spring 2020 quarter. Our class was instructed to conduct research in DU’s archive to create an online exhibit that illustrated a particular story in DU’s history. We were given a tremendous amount of freedom during topic selection, ranging from the history of DU’s swim team to the progression of student-led clubs on campus. The primary restraints of this assignment existed because the Covid-19 pandemic began just a few weeks prior. Normally, research would be conducted in the physical archive located in DU’s library. For this quarter, all research had to be done online and was limited to the archival documents that had been scanned for use. I initially expressed interest in researching the history of student clubs for minorities on DU’s campus from the 1960s to the 2000s. Since I have started my undergraduate education at DU, I have been very much involved with groups such as the Latinx Student Alliance and the Access and Transitions community. Therefore, this topic of research felt familiar, which was comforting as my experience with archival research was quite the opposite. However, I was disappointed to discover that the documents detailing the history of minority-led groups on campus were quite minimal compared to resources for other topics. The lack of documents for my topic can also be attributed to our lack of access to the physical archive. VOLUME 10
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