Digital Archive of Lafayette Magazine

For 80 years Lafayette Magazine has provided a panoramic window on the life of Lafayette College. Soon readers will be able to view and search all of the back issues in a digital archive.

This project, overseen by Skillman Library’s Special Collections and Digital Scholarship Services, was made possible by a generous donation from former Lafayette President Arthur J. Rothkopf ’55 and his wife, Barbara, to the Friends of Skillman Library.

The periodical began as the quarterly Lafayette Alumnus in November 1930. A few years later, sports newsletters were included as inserts. The magazine split into two publications from 1971 to 2004—the features section, renamed Lafayette Alumni Quarterly and later Lafayette Magazine; and the Lafayette Alumni News, a tabloid newspaper containing news stories and class notes. The two were recombined in 2004.

The archive of more than 20,000 digitized pages will be live this spring. It will join the digitized archive of The Lafayette, the student newspaper, also funded by Friends of Skillman, as a major historical resource for the College.