Did you know that Rutgers used to publish yearbooks with student and faculty photos and information about clubs and athletic teams? Each campus of the university had its own yearbook in the twentieth century. The Paul Robeson Library holds many (though not all) old Camden yearbooks printed from the 1930s to the 1990s.

The Archive yearbook

As part of the Digital Camden Archive project, graduate students Isoke Senghor, Raphael Cockings, and Tay Battle worked to digitize the oldest yearbook that we have at the library. This yearbook is from 1931 and it represents the second graduating class of the South Jersey Law School—the original school that would later grow into the Rutgers University–Camden campus. The law school's yearbook was called The Archive. It featured faculty and student profiles and images of the school and moot court sessions. It even included the home addresses of all the graduates so that they could keep in touch with each other after graduation.

The South Jersey Law School was founded in 1926 and printed its first yearbook in 1930 when the first class graduated. Unfortunately, the library does not have the original 1930 yearbook, and it is unknown whether a copy of it still exists in any private collection. You can browse the 1931 yearbook on our website. Subsequent years are available to patrons who come to the library in person.

The Mneme yearbook

Another yearbook associated with the Camden campus is called the Mneme and it comes from the Rutgers era of the campus, which began in the 1950s. The South Jersey Law School and its junior institution, the College of South Jersey, merged with Rutgers University in 1950. The first undergraduate class under the Rutgers banner graduated in 1952, and the students established a committee to publish the Mneme yearbook. The Mneme continued publication until 1996.

The first five volumes of the Mneme, from 1952 to 1956, were digitized by the library several years ago as part of an effort to make early yearbooks across Rutgers University available digitally. You can browse these five yearbooks (and yearbooks from other campuses) in the University Yearbooks Digital Collection portal. Check out the first Mneme for 1952.

The remaining Mneme yearbooks between 1957 and 1996 are available to view in person at the Paul Robeson Library. A small selection of yearbook pages was scanned by students working on various digital exhibits about sports, activism, and student life from the 1950s to the 1990s. You can see these pages below to get an idea of what kind of information is featured in the yearbooks.