LUBBOCK, Texas (KCBD) – There’s plenty of history to go around at the Texas Tech Southwest Collection Special Collections Library.
Southwest Collection archivist Robert Weaver believes this is the place for Texas Tech students to get a sense of what days past were all about.
“It’s a unique opportunity for them to see something they’ve never seen before and that if they leave Texas Tech without seeing it, they may never see it again,” Weaver said. “We take pride in that.”
It all began in 1928. Elizabeth Howard West, the first librarian of the then-named Texas Technological College, partnered with William Curry Holden, the first director of the Texas Tech museum, to reach out to the Espula and Matador Land and Cattle companies to get their ranching records into the university.
The rest, as they say, is history.
“I always say, as do my other fellow archivists here, that the history we have is the history that we have left,” Weaver said.
There’s plenty of history from Lubbock, including items such as the original Ted Fujita drawing outlining the 1970 tornado, photos from decades past showing the city’s growth, and even copies of every Lubbock Avalanche Journal ever printed.
History expands outside of West Texas, though. Emily Grover, the assistant librarian for rare books at the Southwest Collection, said what the collection can offer is something greater than things you can learn from a textbook.
“We get to collect across a really wide range of different cultures, geographic areas, as well as time,” Grover said. “We have everything from cuneiform tablets that are 4,000 years old to contemporary art represented in artists books produced in the early 2000’s.”
The Southwest Collection has now been maintaining this history for nearly 100 years. Staff here hope students and others take advantage of what’s in front of them and soak in everything this collection has to offer.
“We want history to be preserved now and we want it to be here 250 years from now when we are having these same discussions about America’s 500th anniversary,” Weaver said.
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