09/21/17
HAYS, Kan. - Eighty years of Fort Hays State University football history is now digital in the Archives Online of Forsyth Library's Scholars Repository. The new materials went online in September.

The Athletic Programs Collection is available at http://scholars.fhsu.edu/athletic_programs/.

The earliest is the program for the season-ending banquet celebrating the 1921 conference champion Fort Hays Normal School team. The program for the 1922 banquet was not for a conference champion (the champion that year was Baker), but among the information included in the program was a list of the champions from the first 11 years of the conference.

That list reveals that the Tigers were champions in 1917 and 1921, both times with perfect records.

"We wanted to get the football material out there in time for Homecoming, to make it available for alumni and fans," said Elizabeth Chance, Forsyth's digital curation librarian.

"The University Archives house hundreds more items relating to Tiger athletics, and many more of those archives will be added to the digital collections to feature items from men's and women's basketball as well as other Tiger sports," she said.

This is the second major collection of archival material from FHSU's history to be added to the Archives Online, joining the complete Reveille collection, which went online this summer. The Archives Online is at scholars.fhsu.edu.

The Athletic Programs collection, originally digitized in 2014, is nearly 200 printed football programs, football schedules, rosters, awards banquet programs, statistical reports, and other memorabilia relating to Tiger Football from the years 1922-2002.

This collection was moved to take advantage of the improved user experience of the Scholars Repository. This new version of the collection features full-text search capabilities along with a book reader view for most items.