From 1893 to 1912 Rensselaer’s administrative offices were located in the Alumni Building on Troy’s Second Street. The building also housed the Institute’s library and teaching collections for geology and mineralogy. Located a half-mile from the main campus, the building was inconvenient for both students and administrators. In 1909, at the mid-winter alumni dinner in Pittsburgh, the Alumni Association of Pittsburgh pledged $125,000 to build a new administration building closer to campus on the former site of the Ranken House.

At this year’s national Society of American Archivists (SAA) conference in Austin, Texas, I had the honor of presenting to a crowd of over 100 archivists for a session titled Unboxing the Archives: Transforming Collections with Augmented Reality and Collaborative Design. This session included five speakers from academic, museum, archives, and public library settings.

In 1907, Mrs. Russell Sage gave Rensselaer $1,000,000 as a memorial to her husband, Russell Sage, a New York financier, who, for ten years prior to his death, was a trustee of the Institute. Of this amount, $300,000 was contributed toward erecting and equipping a laboratory for the use of newly established courses in mechanical and electrical engineering.

I've had many wonderful opportunities as an archivist to work with exceptional students here at RPI. One such student, Noah Zucker, is graduating with the Class of 2019 this year with a degree in Computer Science. Noah recently told me that as of July, he'll be working for Facebook as a Designer for Social Virtual Reality. I couldn't be happier for him, and I'm so thankful to have worked with him on a large augmented reality project for the Archives, during the summer of 2017.

Words are the only things that last forever; they are more durable than the eternal hills. - William Hazlitt, English essayist

What’s big, red, and is celebrated like a hockey version of Mardi Gras? That would be Rensselaer’s Big Red Freakout, of course!

                    Student Club House In 1906 a committee of Rensselaer graduates met in New York City for the purpose of organizing a Rensselaer Student’s Association.

Sixty years ago, NASA was formed, the microchip was invented, Ella Fitzgerald was on the radio, and four men from RPI won the National Handball Championship in Chicago, Illinois. That’s right! Mike McQuillen, Harvey Poppell, Jerry Gonick, and Fernando Arias, under the guidance of RPI’s Athletic Director, “Pop” Graham, won the National Cup in handball, a sport that the team, besides Gonick, had never played until freshman year of college.

In my July 25 post about an RPI/Troy souvenir spoon, I mentioned the jeweler F. W. Sim & Co.  This was a local firm headed by Frederic W. Sim of Troy.  That was enough information for my purposes - that is, until I happened upon another connection between Mr. Sim and RPI.