Fogler Library Friends - The OliveTree

VOLUME 18 NUMBER 1, SPRING 2010

Maine Forester Now Online

by Sharon Quinn Fitzgerald, Head Technical Services and Library Web Manager

We are happy to announce that The Maine Forester has joined the Yearbooks Online and the Maine town Reports on the growing list of digital collections available from Fogler Library. Our partner in this endeavor is the School of Forest Resources who provided full print sets for us to scan in order to preserve this unique publication and provide online access. The Maine Forester is a hybrid publication that has served as both a traditional yearbook with requisite student and faculty photos but also includes selected research papers from the School. There are amusing sketches and the occasional ode to life in the Maine woods as well. An excerpt from one of the latter in the first volume published in 1923, “The Forestry Guy”:
A knightly figure amid the green,
In khaki instead of mail,
A face of bronze, eyes quick and keen—
Swift hoofbeats on the trail;
A home in the saddle through the summer days,
A bed ‘neath the evening sky;
Who is it travels the silent ways?
He’s only a forestry guy.

In viewing the volumes online you will get a sense of how the tenor of the publication changed over the years. Sparsely published in the 1920s and 1930s it appeared annually starting in 1936 through 1941, taking a significant hiatus during the years of World War II. Late in the 1950s the design shifted toward a considerably larger format very similar to the University’s Prism yearbook. Special articles continued to be a hallmark however. One example in the 1971 edition is a guest article written by Senator Edmund S. Muskie. In 1969 the beautiful new building we now know as Nutting Hall was proudly featured on the cover as the facility opened to students. There is also a special edition published in 2003 in conjunction with the 100th anniversary of the Forestry School.

All of the volumes are keyword searchable. Most volumes were commercially published but several hand typed volumes proved to be a challenge for text recognition. The more recent editions of the digitized volumes are served online in several sections. This is because the file size of the image intensive content is so large and the division improves the web browser load time to an acceptable level for patrons.

Throughout the 80 year history of the publication wonderful photographs of the Maine woods and waterways have been captured and a number of these grace the cover. On our web site we have the opportunity of featuring a sampling of these as part of our navigational guide.
We encourage you to explore these pages online at http://library.umaine.edu/forester and send us your feedback.

For more information about this and other digitization projects, visit our Gateway to Digital Collections at http://libraries.maine.edu/gateway/

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