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This photo showing the 1910 baseball team is one of many included in a new collection about the history of the sport at OSU.

New library collection batting on the past

Archives set to open in time for the Beavers' home opener

By: Lauren Dillard

Posted: 3/1/07

The ball, as large as 17 inches around, was made of material that wouldn't damage the furniture.

Starting in 1898, the Oregon Agricultural College had an indoor baseball team.

This information and more can soon be found on a Web site with information compiled by OSU archivists. The site will feature baseball archives from as early as 1898.

This year - and the beginning of this season - marks the centennial of baseball in Corvallis.

According to Larry Landis, a university archivist, the library team was thinking about a project on OSU baseball well before the Beavers won the College World Series.

"Winning the national championship is just icing on the cake," Landis said.

As of 1907, the baseball team became a permanent - and outdoor - fixture for OAC.

The Valley Library is constantly collecting and sorting through archives. The baseball archives were no different.

The Baseball Centennial project started when OSU archivists started taking already-sorted baseball archives and scanning them to make them available online. They started working as early as last spring.

"Our plan is to continue building it as we have the time and as we discover new materials," Landis said.

Paul Andresen, an OSU alumni and retired Hewlett-Packard engineer, was also involved in the project.

"I got semi-volunteered," Andresen said. Using other photographs and mugshots of players, Andresen spent much of his time on the project trying to identify the men in the photos.

"With all of the work that I did, the staff at the archives was terribly helpful," Andresen said.

The archives also feature an ongoing blog by archivists and a feature where users can comment on digital archives.

"Hopefully former players will find it," Landis said. "We are trying to make it a little more interactive."

The benefits of allowing users to comment on archives include being able to identify individuals in photographs and post stories about photographs.

The Baseball Centennial Collection Web site, which will be linked from the library Web site, will be available before March 8 - the first home game of the season.

"It's a great way of letting people know about OSU Baseball," said Kip Carlson, assistant director of OSU Sports Information.

The project, organized by Senior Staff Archivist Elizabeth Nielson, may be available as early as Friday.

This online archive and others are created because of the high-demand of certain archives and their potential use of research purposes.

Photos and short films are posted to the Web site, after small tweaks by archivists using Adobe Photoshop.

"We want the photo to be as close to the original as possible," Landis said.

Indoor baseball, which survived until 1907, was actually successful at Oregon Agricultural College. In 1900, the team won games against the University of Oregon, Albany College, and the Salem YMCA.

The Spalding rule book specified corrugated rubber shoes as the footwear of choice.

"It's like softball on steroids or something," Andresen said.

"[The site] shows that there's been an awful lot of good baseball at OSU over the years," Carlson said.

The Web site, while not technically available through the library Web site, can be viewed at http://osulibrary.oregonstate.edu/digitalcollections/baseball/.