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FL-Islandora Guide: Florida State College at Jacksonville

A guide for FL-Islandora users.

Florida State College at Jacksonville FL- Islandora Profile

Institution:  Florida State College at Jacksonville

Contact:  Madeline Sims

Production site created: 11/03/2017   URL: https://fscj.digital.flvc.org 

Total number of titles/objects as of 7/24/2024: 10,045

Total number of files as of 7/24/2024: 81,541

Collections

Collections: 

  • College Catalogs (1966-2019): 

 

  • College Histories: 
  • http://fscj.digital.flvc.org/islandora/object/fscj:collegehistory  
  • When most people refer to the written history of Florida State College at Jacksonville, they mean A College Tells its Story, the oral history compiled in 1991 by Professor Robert Gentry and published by the College on the occasion of its 25th anniversary. However, Gentry’s work was just the most recent and most ambitious of the efforts to chronicle the life of the institution. FSCJ valued its history from the beginning, and began efforts to preserve and record it within just a few years of opening their doors in 1966. This collection features the various written histories produced by the College over the decades, as well as a subcollection dedicated to A College Tells its Story and materials related to it. 
  • Commencement Programs
      • https://fscj.digital.flvc.org/islandora/object/fscj:commencement
      • Commencement Programs starting in 1968-Present.
      • Florida Junior College held its first Commencement on Friday May 3, 1968. Almost 150 gray-gowned students accepted their diplomas from President J. Bruce Wilson in Jacksonville’s Civic Auditorium while the exhortations of the speaker, Florida Atlantic University President Dr. Kenneth Williams, still rang in their ears: “Each of you has ability, differing in kind and degree. Will you use it in dedication to making the world a better place, or will you allow it to become dissipated?”

        Every year since, FSCJ has gathered to celebrate its graduates. Occasionally these celebrations pull double-duty as presidential inaugurations, as with Benjamin Wygal in 1971; frequently they feature prominent speakers such as NASA’s Dr. Wernher von Braun (1974), CBS’s Charles Kuralt (1975), actress Pearl Bailey (1978), journalist Carl Bernstein (1979), Assistant Secretary of State Harold Saunders (1981), Florida governor Farris Bryant (1982), Florida House Speaker John Thrasher (1999), and Florida Attorney General (and later Governor and US House Representative) Charlie Crist (2005). After the College celebrated its 25th anniversary in 1991, its newly-minted Alma Mater – written by student Carole Varney - became a regular feature at each ceremony, annually extolling students to move toward the “high-held goals, within our sights.”
      • In 1986, the College began hosting separate award ceremonies for graduates of the Adult Basic Education and its High School commencement. For organizational purposes, the programs for these events are included within this collection.
      • This collection represents programs from most, but not all, of the Commencements hosted by FSCJ between 1968 and the current year.
  • Cookbooks

  • The Experience (1968-2018): 
      • http://fscj.digital.flvc.org/islandora/object/fscj:experience 
      • FSCJ’s literary magazine. 
      • In the Fall of 1967, Florida Junior College – then only a year old – published its first literary magazine, Reason ’67. Nineteen pages long, Reason included student art and poetry and accepted contributions from other schools in the southeast, but it lasted only a single issue before its faculty advisor, Monett Powers, stepped down. Marilyn DeSimone, finishing out her first term teaching at FJC, stepped in as faculty advisor, a position she would go on to hold for more than two decades. When DeSimone met with the magazine’s staff (comprised of M.D. Kervin, Audrey Randolph, Jack Joyner, Gail Leewright, Roberta Butler, Charlie Daniel, Jon Grinter, Sunny Prevatt, and Bob Knapp), the students decided they wanted a fresh start and a new name for their publishing endeavor. A contest yielded the magazine’s new title: The Experience. The first issue, printed in the Fall of 1968, opened with a quote from Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses”: “I am a part of all I have met.” 
      • Though it started at a slim twenty pages, The Experience burgeoned with student poetry, short stories, sketching, and oils, and by 1975 had grown to over sixty pages in length. In 1988, it began accepting submissions of student photography. The following year saw a delay in publishing when the magazine, which had no budget of its own and had been supported variously by the Director of Public Affairs and Student Activities, was not allocated funding, and thereafter the publication became annual. It remains in publication today, a student literary and artistic tradition now over fifty years old.
      • The Experience was written and edited by students of Florida State College at Jacksonville (Florida Junior College) and they are solely responsible for its editorial policy and content. The views, information, or opinions expressed are solely those of individuals involved and do not necessarily reflect the views of other students, staff members, faculty, or administration of Florida State College at Jacksonville. FSCJ is not responsible and does not verify for accuracy any of the information contained in this publication.
  • Galleries

Collections

  • ICTL: International Conference on Teaching & Learning  (proceedings 1993-2015): 
  • Kalliope (1979-2008): 
  • Life @ FSCJ
  • Miss FJC
  • News
    • https://fscj.digital.flvc.org/islandora/object/fscj%3Anews
    • Florida State College has been making news ever since the idea of creating a public community college in Jacksonville was first floated in the early 1960s. To keep track of the College and its accomplishments, librarians, the Marketing department, and other various employees kept clip files, which have been compiled to create this collection. The collection will eventually span from 1964 through the early 2000s, with the vast majority of the articles having appeared originally in either The Florida Times-Union or the Jacksonville Journal, the city’s two primary newspapers, which published in the morning and afternoon respectively before eventually merging in the 1980s. In order to respect the copyright of the original publications, access to this collection is limited to individuals using a computer with an FSCJ IP address who might reasonably be using these sources for research purposes.
  • FJC Scape (1975-1984) 

    • State Street Review Collection
      • https://fscj.digital.flvc.org/islandora/object/fscj:statestreetreview
      • State Street Review began as a simple booklet of four to six pages featuring the winning pieces from the festival’s College-sponsored writing contests. With the switch to the more ambitious name and mission in 1990, the decision was made to expand the format of the Review into a literary magazine that would feature not only poetry but also fiction, drama, and free-lance articles. Howard Denson, who had by this time taken over running the Festival, taught himself PageMaker to lay out the first issue, which debuted in Summer of 1990 with help from Frank Green, Sohrab Homi Fracis, Michele Boyette, and John Hunt. The original goal was to publish quarterly, but the Review managed only two issues a year for its first two years before settling into an annual publication schedule in 1992.

    • Student Newspapers
      • https://fscj.digital.flvc.org/islandora/object/fscj%3Astudentnewspapers
      • Alpha (1968-1969): 
        • http://fscj.digital.flvc.org/islandora/object/fscj:alpha  
        • Florida Junior College’s first student newspaper. 
        • First published in 1967, Florida Junior College’s first monthly student newspaper, Alpha, was organized as a club and financed through the student activities fund. Sponsored by faculty member Jack Wilson, Alpha ’68 ran under the editorial direction of Mike Brannen and Alpha ’69 under Larry Burris, whose editorial tenure was interrupted when he was drafted into the Vietnam War after dropping a class. Burris’s assistant editor, Doug Sease, went on to write for the Jacksonville Journal before going on to a career at the Wall Street Journal that lasted almost thirty years. By August of 1968, Alpha was struggling to find sufficient staff to publish, and it ceased publication shortly thereafter. It was replaced briefly by another student newspaper, Orionis, which published through 1972. The College did not have another newspaper until The Campus Voice was founded in January 1987. 
  • The Campus Voice (1987-2014)
        • https://fscj.digital.flvc.org/islandora/object/fscj:thecampusvoice
        • The college-sponsored, student-run publication serving Florida State College at Jacksonville. 
        • The Campus Voice is the college-sponsored, student-run publication serving Florida State College at Jacksonville. Launched in January of 1987, TCV was staffed by approximately ten students under the direction of student editor-in-chief Mark Deichmiller, who went on to work at the Miami Herald and Seattle Times, and faculty advisor Professor Kevin Bezner, a former features and music writer for The Florida Times-Union whose work had also been published by the Baltimore Sun and the San Francisco Review of Books. At the time of TCV’s creation, the College had been without a newspaper for almost twenty years since the discontinuation of the first student publication, Alpha, and its short-lived successor Stella Omni. TCV went on to great success over the ensuing decades and won several awards, including first place for Outstanding Junior College Newspaper in 1990 from the Southern Regional Press Institute and four first place awards (Best In-Depth Reporting, Editorial Writing, Arts Review, and Editorial Cartoon) from the Florida Community College Press Association in 2007. 
      • Orionis (1972)
      • Perspective

    • Summer Musical Theatre
    • Voices of College Composition
      • https://fscj.digital.flvc.org/islandora/object/fscj%3Avoicesoffreshmanwriting
      • In April of 1991, the College’s Communications Department launched Voices of Freshman Writing, an annual publication featuring works by composition students at South Campus nominated by their professors and then selected by editor Joanne Metzler. Metzler, a FJC alum who had worked on The Experience during her time as a student, selected fourteen pieces for the inaugural issue, among them one student’s stirring account of creating a memorial panel for a friend on the AIDS Quilt and another’s impassioned argument for the social and poetic value of hip-hop.

        Initially intended as a recruitment and retention tool, most of the published copies of Voices were distributed by Dean of Communications Charles Smires to English teachers in the Duval County Public School system to give high school students a better idea of the type of writing required in college courses, with remaining copies going to College faculty for a use as a teaching resource or to common areas on campus such as the library or cafeteria. By its second issue, Voices already included a segment called Voices Across the Curriculum which highlighted writing by students in non-English courses; by 2004, the cross-departmental nature of the publication, now also open to submission by sophomores, was reflected in its rebranding as Voices of College Composition.

        While the first issue was funded by the mini grant from the College’s Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning, the success of Voices earned it its own line in the Communications Department budget. Editors, who received a stipend for their labors, were initially chosen from staff in the Writing Lab, as working on the project helped them become more involved with English faculty. Metzler was followed by Wayne Haddock (1994-1995), Kathleen Ciez-Volz (1996-2000), and Suzanne Hess (2001-2010), all under the direction of Dean Smires.

        The 20th Anniversary edition, which appeared only in an online format, coincided with the retirement of Dr. Hess from the project and Dean Smires from the College, bringing the run of Voices to a close.
  • Women's Center
  • Worth Quoting 
  • http://fscj.digital.flvc.org/islandora/object/fscj:WorthQuoting 
  • Recordings and transcripts from FSCJ’s speaker series.  Interviewees include Alice Walker, Bettina Gregory, Beverly Sills, Joan Lunden and Margaret Atwood. 
  • Worth Quoting is a speaker series sponsored by Florida State College at Jacksonville which ran for over twenty years, beginning in 1982 when Ellen Goodman, syndicated columnist and author, came to Jacksonville for a speaking engagement. The Florida Junior College Television Department, then part of the Division of Continuing Education, recognized the value of capturing interviews with influential figures such as Ms. Goodman on tape and subsequently making them available to students and the community. Ellen Goodman’s audio taping was so successful that the decision was made to move to video, and Ms. Goodman was followed by notables such as Margaret Atwood, Shirley Chisholm, and Alice Walker. The initial focus on women and women’s issues gradually enlarged to include noteworthy men on social, political, and literary issues. Claude Pepper, Stanley Karnow, and Rushworth Kidder were among those who graciously granted interviews. The program ran on Channel 26, the educational channel which the College began operating in 1980 to host its telecourses. Eventually Channel 26 featured programming from 6 a.m. to midnight every day, and reached over 200,000 households.  This collection represents the majority, but not by any means all, of the interviews filmed for this series. 
  • Writer to Writer 
  • http://fscj.digital.flvc.org/islandora/object/fscj:WritertoWriter 
  • A series of interviews with local and national authors.  
  • Writer to Writer is a series of interviews with local and national authors which ran for over a decade after launching with six pilot episodes (including interviews with science fiction and fantasy writer Alan Dean Foster and mystery writer Stuart Kaminsky) in 1994. The series started when Kathleen Clower, then the Director of Television Production for Florida Community College at Jacksonville, became interested in the Florida First Coast Writers Festival. An annual event sponsored by the College which offered writing and publishing workshops, the Festival was founded in 1985 by Professor Jack Surrency and but had come under the direction of Professor Howard Denson by the early ‘90s. After attending one of the Festivals, Clower was impressed by the caliber of the speakers being brought in, and thought it would be worthwhile to create an interview series similar to Worth Quoting featuring them. With the cooperation of Denson, Clower reached out to several of the authors schedule for the 1994 event, and convinced them to participate. Once the authors had committed, Clower built a simple set on which Writer to Writer could be filmed and then found interviewers who were familiar with the authors’ works and had read at least one of their books, including Mary Sue Koeppel, Carol Grimes, and Charlie Patton of The Florida Times-Union. Eventually Clower herself became the Festival coordinator, which made lining up interviews even easier, and she wound up producing over 50 episodes of Writer to Writer. 

Noteworthy features of this site: 

  • FSCJ makes excellent use of graphics in all its collections and is a very attractive site. 
  • The “Worth Quoting” and “Writer to Writer” collections of videos might be of particular interest to national and international users.