Accession 03001 - MSU--Bozeman Faculty Biographies, ca. 1900-1990

Provenance Note: Alphabetically arranged files containing biographical information pertaining to former and current members of the Montana State University faculty were created and maintained by the University Archives beginning in the early 1960s.

Historical Note: Montana State University was founded in 1893 as the Montana College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts. Among the first faculty members were Benjamin Maiden, Frank W. Traphagen, Luther Foster, and Augustus Ryon, who also served as the first president of the institution. During the next 100 years, the University never adopted a formal collecting policy for biographical information on its faculty members, but sometime in the early 1960s library and archive staff members began gathering newspaper clippings, press releases, notes, and reminiscences to document biographical information on former and current faculty members. These items were maintained alphabetically in a series of vertical filing cabinets. The practice appears to have ceased sometime in the in the early 1990s.

Content Description Note: This collection includes all the faculty biographical files that were created prior to the abandonment of the practice. Originally interfiled with examples of the particular faculty member's publications, many of these files bear the unique University Archives classification numbers that had been used in lieu of the Dewey or Library of Congress systems.

Contents

Newspaper clippings, notes, letters, printed materials, photocopies and original documents pertaining to faculty members from every college within Montana State University. Not all faculty members are represented, and some files are particularly scant.

Contents | Special Collections

Updated: 5/18/09