Students research campus history to create online audiovisual tour

Two Cornell College students, Brad Kane ’18 and Hannah Robertson ’18, are searching for information each day in the college archives at the Cole library.

That’s where rows and rows of boxes and books filled with documents and pictures hold the history of the college.

Kane and Robertson are teaming up with Professor Catherine Stewart to compile a history of 10 significant buildings on campus in order to create an online tour for the public, which is their Cornell Summer Research Institute project.

“We are researching the various histories of 10 important buildings on campus, along with historical photographs of them, and we are compiling all of this information into several pages of data and creating a website based on it – that will be displayed in an audio-visual format,” Kane said.

The students are partnering with two community groups for the project, the Mount Vernon Historic Preservation Commission and the Mount Vernon-Lisbon Community Development Group. They are contributing the Cornell information to a project the community groups began in 2014 to create self-guided audio tours for three national register districts, Mount Vernon’s commercial district, Cornell’s campus, and Ash Park.

“It’s kind of a rare opportunity for them to actually be engaging at this type of professional level and working with community members in the local areas to create an online website that will be available and of use to future generations,” Professor Stewart said.

Find out more by watching their video story: