The Exhibits Program’s displays at NC State’s D.H. Hill Jr. Library are not only entertaining to students, but also a great resource. The displays introduce researchers and curious observers to all that the Special Collections Research Center has to offer.
Beginning in April 2021, Technician 100: Celebrating a Century of Student Journalism at NC State exhibit resided in the Exhibit Gallery on the second floor of D.H. Hill Jr. Library. The Technician 100 exhibit featured prominent aspects of the paper’s history, in honor of its hundredth year of operation.
Highlighting Technician’s humble beginnings, the exhibit discussed the eight-person staff that launched the initial four-page issue of the paper in February 1920. It then dove into the racial unrest that led to the creation of the Nubian Message, as well as the development of the paper in the decades since.
Charles Samuels, the creative director for University Libraries, said the lengthy process of researching, building and executing an exhibit takes roughly a year, the Technician 100 exhibit being no exception.
The project was underway prior to March 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic struck. At the time, Molly Renda was head of the Exhibits Program, leading the development of the Technician 100 exhibit. After retiring at an early stage of the pandemic, Renda left the half-finished exhibit in the hands of Samuels as the new creative director.
“The Exhibits Program sort of got put on hold during the pandemic,” Samuels said. “We started to come back and do some hybrid work on the Technician exhibit again. … Generally, with exhibits at the libraries, what we try to do is use our Exhibits Program to feature the Libraries Special Collections to help connect students and researchers in the campus community to what items the library has in its Special Collections.”
In the case of the Technician 100 exhibit, this would include all past copies of the paper.
“We have the full collection of the Technician newspapers digitized and in our collection, so students and researchers can access that at any time online,” Samuels said.
Samuels said from here on out, the Special Collections department will be doing more front-end research, curation and planning of the exhibits. The External Relations department will serve as a design department.
Each exhibit will remain intact until the next exhibit is ready for installation. When the time comes for an exhibit to be taken down, several things can occur.
“Sometimes, exhibits will have sort of a second life,” Samuels said. “We had an exhibit about B.W. Wells, … a North Carolina naturalist illustrator and photographer. We had some exhibit panels from that donated to a local organization. Sometimes we’re able to donate the exhibit panels themselves to an organization that may want to keep them or put them on display somewhere.”
Another aspect of disassembling an exhibit involves returning borrowed items to their owners. Samuels recalled that the library temporarily used photographic enlargers, old pictures, dated copies of Technician and other memorabilia in the Technician 100 display.
Todd Kosmerick, a University archivist, said old-fashioned printing blocks were one such example of items extracted from the University Archives for the Technician exhibit.
“We have some things like that in the archives, so we lent that to the exhibit to give people an example of what the technology [used] once was to print the Technician papers,” Kosmerick said.
Photos used in exhibit panels, such as that of the Technician 100, are often a product of the Special Collections. However, these pictures have to be protected from the elements to remain in good condition.
“[The Exhibits Program] uses a lot of images from the University Archives for many exhibits,” Kosmerick said. “What you see in the exhibit is a reproduction of that photo. The light would probably have an adverse effect on it, but it’s very easy to reproduce it.”
Although an excellent tribute to the rich history of NC State’s century of student journalism, the Technician 100 exhibit was removed in August 2022 to make room for the Dare and Do! Women’s History at NC State exhibit, which is now on display. However, the Technician 100 exhibit will remain accessible through the University Libraries website.
