In the early 1960s, DePaul launched a ten-year master plan, “Program for Greatness.” The plan featured mock-ups of the Lincoln Park campus, proposed buildingssome completed, some not and various statistics on the university (which boasted an average annual salary of $8,124 for faculty). The decade surely saw greatness achieved at the University, and measures of the success are incarnate in the Schmidt Academic Center and other buildings from the era that still stand today. Indeed, DePaul’s rich history and ambitious growth constitute its very face; from the Loop campus with a building on the National Register of Historic Places to the Lincoln Park Campus that is seemingly ever expanding, DePaul’s buildings are monuments of its past, present, and future accomplishments. To showcase these buildings and their evolutions, DePaul’s Digital Projects has collaborated with Special Collections and Archives to create the DePaul University Buildings Collection, an online repository of photographs and images of DePaul’s buildings and campuses.
The DePaul University Buildings Collection allows anyone to access nearly 1,700 images perhaps traveling back to a day when DePaul consisted of only two buildings without ever leaving the couch. Users can search for specific buildings or figures from DePaul’s history, or they can use one of several browsing options located on the collection’s home page. Alumni can find pictures of now-razed buildings from their glory days. Current students can get a glimpse of what their dorms (and fellow students) would have looked like had they attended in the ’70s. And if the online content leaves one wanting more information, the extensive collection of University Archives associated with the Buildings Collection is open to the public at the Special Collections and Archives in the John T. Richardson Library.