I've been away for a few days at a conference of archivists - the annual meeting of the Society of American Archivists - to borrow a phrase, where people like me go to feel normal. Of course, coming home, I found a few reference requests that had piled up in my absence, and in answering one, I had to look in the old college catalogues.
When people ask me what I like about being an archivist, my standard (and truthful) answer is that I learn something new every day. Even after 10 1/2 years here, I am still finding documents that I've never seen before, and very often, I find them simply by stumbling across them as I look for something else. This morning, as I looked in the bound volume of old catalogues, I found a printed program for a senior exhibition from May 1857, along with a printed program from the 1857 Commencement exercises. I'm not quite sure how I had missed those in the past, but perhaps I had been looking in another bound volume of these books that didn't have these programs.
In any event, I scanned them both, and am sharing them here. Someone has written the date of the 1857 Commencement on the program, but they've also written that this was the "first" Commencement, and that's not quite true. It was actually the third, and the second one with graduates. It was, however, the first commencement with a significant number of graduates, most of whom had been studying together for three years.
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