With classes back in session on the 40 Acres, it won’t be long before students are huddled around books and notes, cramming for exams.
It’s a time that Frank Meaker has come to catalog – but not on a way you’d expect.
Meaker’s been with the University of Texas for 25 years; for the last 10 years, Meaker’s worked at the Perry-Castañeda Library as a maintenance specialist. Toward the end of each semester, he noticed the whiteboards in study rooms would be filled with drawings – some crude, some detailed, but all a window into stressed-out students’ minds.
“At the time I hade one of those cheaper little flip phones; I would take just a few pictures and send them to my friend,” Travis Willmann, who administers the UT Libraries Flickr page.
Meaker says as phone’s built-in cameras improved, “we started taking pictures, downloading and saving them.” The images that are family-appropriate – just about one-third of the doodles Meaker comes across – are now posted to the PCL Whiteboards page of the libraries’ Flickr account.
Its inside the mind of what these students are thinking and doing on a daily basis – from after school activities to their classwork – some of it says ‘Good luck on your finals,’ or ‘I have biology,’” Meaker says. “It’s a whole gamut of what these students are thinking and doing and their lives.”
“It’s almost like we’re in a preservation mode,” Meaker adds. “We’re preserving this history of what these kids are thinking what these kids are doing on a daily basis and what their lives are.”
