A joint research project between UALR’s Office of the Chancellor, Office of Records and Registration and the Office of Alumni and Development has yielded valuable information regarding institutional history and fundraising capabilities.
Until only recently, a large bulk of the university’s history lay in boxes in the Office of Records and Registration. The need was identified and a project began to digitize these records and scan the original files into a relational database. More than 100,000 records, both alumni and non-alumni, were included.
The Office of Alumni and Development’s Information Services division used several of their resources, including the Advance fundraising/alumni database, to append the most up-to-date information on these records. In all, the department was able to increase its current solicitable footprint by more than 30 percent, a respectable number considering that many of these records date back to the ’60’s and earlier.
“This is a big chunk of our history that was simply disintegrating before our very eyes,” describes Christian O’Neal, Associate Vice Chancellor of Alumni and Development. “Getting these people into our database is a double-win in that we can now preserve that part of the university forever while helping to better reach out to those who loved their time at UALR and can help us in our ongoing goal to improve it.”
