The Washington Alumnus, UW’s First Alumni Magazine, Now Available Online
UW has had an alumni magazine since 1908. More recently known as the University of Washington Magazine and Columns, the alumni magazine was first known as The Washington Alumnus (1908-1963). Earlier this year, UW Libraries completed the full digitization of all of The Washington Alumnus issues, now available to view online!
Similar to the University’s Tyee Yearbooks, The Daily, and other student publications that you can view online, paging through the Washington Alumnus is a fascinating trip through time, showing what campus life was like over the first half of the 20th century. Browsing the articles, photographs, and advertising is like looking through a window into the University’s priorities of the day, major moments in history, and changing social norms and societal trends. Editorials by University leadership often made their case for campus initiatives, including funding new buildings and departments, growing the Library collections, and other campus improvements.
While the focus of content has shifted over time, the one constant is its features on student life, faculty achievement, and collegiate sports. From full feature stories on a particular course, or faculty research, to short briefs on the career trajectories of the newest grads to legendary alumni. Interspersed between stories you’ll see a montage of advertisements, from local businesses on the Ave, to well-know Pacific Northwest companies (Bartell Drug, Rainier Beer, Nordstrom, Dairygold) as well as national companies like Bell Telephone Company.
The project to digitize The Washington Alumnus was initiated by John Bolcer, University Archivist. Under the guidance of Jesse Stanley, Collections Digitization Librarian, a team of Preservation Services staff and student employees worked over much of 2025 to digitize the publication. 2025 James Leland Dirks, Jr. Library Preservation Intern Toni Heilman made the digitization of The Washington Alumnus a significant part of her final internship project.
The digitization of a long-running publication, especially one that was published for more than 50 years, is no small feat. Over time, some issues lost pages or covers and some were missing entirely. Issues could be in such poor condition or so tightly bound that scanning them was extremely difficult.
UW Libraries Special Collections staff dug deep into the University archives to find as many duplicate copies issues as possible and the Preservation team carefully inventoried and collated them to identify gaps and pick the best copies for scanning, comparing issues on a page-by-page basis. In the end, a full and complete run of The Washington Alumnus was pieced together, bringing the entirety of this University publication together and making it available online for the first time.
Scanning the pages was only the first step in the long road to making these materials available online. In order to make the issues accessible and searchable, every issue was converted to machine-readable text via OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and structural metadata was created. Once completed, the high-resolution TIFF files, OCR text, structural metadata, and catalog record were deposited to HathiTrust, a not-for-profit collaborative of academic and research libraries that has preserved more than 19 million digitized items.
The legal side of making the publication openly available required time and collaboration. UW Libraries worked with Jon Marmor, Editor-in-Chief of University of Washington Magazine, throughout the process to secure open access for the entirety of the publication.
You can view The Washington Alumnus volumes online at HathiTrust, and learn more about the history of University publications in the University of Washington Archives: Publications.
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