When architect J.M. McBird was designing the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's University Hall back in 1869, he deemed its architectural style to be "Franco Italianate."
Nebraska's governor at the time, David Butler, was hoping the towering structure would attract more visitors to Lincoln while also upping property values.
It's a pretty sure bet, however, that neither man could have anticipated the possibility that students would take a "virtual tour" of their creation while sitting in their dorm rooms nearly 140 years later.
In fact, if they could, it would stand to reason that Butler might also have foreseen his eventual impeachment, but that's a whole other story. One that can be found on the recently launched UNL Libraries Web site, http://historicbuildings.unl.edu/index.html, which features an architectural tour of historic UNL.
Thanks primarily to the efforts of Architecture Librarian Kay Logan-Peters, who was not available for comment, and her team of student researchers, the myriad archival information and photos of the city campus and east campus buildings can now be viewed with the click of a mouse.
"I think it will really help to make people around campus more aware of the documented history of the university here," said Zach Bajaber, a digital resources designer who assisted with the general design and user interface for the site.
"There's some really fascinating buildings here and also on east campus that might not even be there any more. It's all documented on the university's archives and it's really about taking advantage of those resources and making people aware of them."
Stacy Ann Rickel, the library's technical coordinator who made the site functional in its present form, first became aware of the venture in 2004 when Peters brought it to her attention.
"It was a project that she and one of her students had been working on, designing it in a Flash environment," said Rickel, who's been working on the site ever since. "She needed a way to keep it going after the student left and needed to find a way to make it something that they could easily edit and change as time went on. So I migrated the old Web site into a database.
"There's a lot of material in there and I didn't know a lot of it until I started working on it."
For example, a historical overview on the site explains how the original 11-acre UNL campus grew to more than 500 acres spread out over two campuses with more than 100 classroom buildings, research facilities, athletic buildings and dormitories. Visitors can also look at hundreds of photos of buildings on both campuses while reading up on the histories that accompany those structures.
"I think it's intriguing to look at what campus looked like back then," Rickel said. "To see buildings that were torn down and see where the old buildings were."
As comprehensive as the site already is, Rickel said it is still in its very early stages and expects that she and Peters will continue to add features, possibly including the incorporation of mapping technologies that will give visitors a bird's eye view of UNL throughout history.
"Maybe it's just trivia right now, but hopefully some of it's going to be useful in research areas," Rickel said. "I hope it provides access to material that maybe wasn't available to (researchers) before."
Bajaber said UNL libraries are pursuing several "visual initiatives" similar to the architectural Web site in the interest of digitizing archive content for preservation and awareness.
"There are thousands of images available to the public for free," he said. "I hope that people go to the Web site and learn some history and that they'll be able to walk around campus with a fresh eye on the really deep history that we're sometimes not aware of.
"I think people with an eye for architecture will really appreciate it."
Perhaps there's a future J.M. McBird out there who'll be inspired by the new site to design something for the university's next 140 years.
ryankathman@dailynebraskan.com
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