WEATHERFORD – In collaboration with the Al Harris Library at Southwestern Oklahoma State University (SWOSU) in Weatherford, SWOSU Athletics is proud to reveal its ongoing project to preserve and consolidate a collection of historical sports materials.
In possession of decades worth of old film, pictures, and documents, SWOSU Athletics partnered with the Al Harris Library to create a database through SWOSU's Digital Commons that will serve as a central hub to house all collected athletic assets in a centralized location.
SWOSU's first round of film successfully converted to a digital format comes from the sports of football and men's basketball. The football page features 61 different videos spanning from 1955-87 including the 1977 Apple Bowl broadcast. The men's basketball page currently holds 15 videos from four years of competition: 1973, 1978, 1979, and 1983.
These digital copies have been placed on the university's repository, SWOSU Digital Commons, which are viewable at the following URL: https://dc.swosu.edu/ath_media/
The SWOSU Digital Commons publishes scholarly and creative works by SWOSU faculty and students. The Digital Commons also provides a wide array of materials celebrating the history of the University and the diverse peoples and cultures of western Oklahoma. Athletics was pleased to provide its additional sports materials to grow an already extensive University archive.
The Al Harris Library was awarded an Oklahoma Heritage Preservation Grant by the Oklahoma Historical Society, which will help preservation efforts for the Thomas P. Stafford Archives.
Historical recordings from the SWOSU Athletics Office were among the nearly 200 analog media assets recently digitized. Subsequently, the Al Harris Library received the same grant again and will solely focus on digitizing athletic recordings. The completion of this project and subsequent work is part of the long-term goals associated with the General Thomas P. Stafford Archives. This work will not only digitally preserve information from analog assets documenting the university's athletic history, but it will also provide public access to images and sounds recorded nearly 70 years ago.
The library will be digitizing another 100-plus obsolete-format-video assets in 2024. Those additional videos will be added to the Athletics Media repository as digitization work is completed. Additional sports will also be added in the future alongside additional material formats such as media guides, gameday programs, and pictures.
