The University of Michigan School of Information (UMSI) will be moving into a new building in 2025, and with moving prep comes an opportunity to reflect on change and the places the school has called home. 

UMSI began as the University of Michigan Department of Library Science in 1926, eventually becoming the School of Information in 1996. Many buildings have housed the school over the decades. UMSI has grown rapidly and currently occupies four leased commercial spaces in downtown Ann Arbor in addition to the school’s headquarters in North Quad. The Leinweber Computer Science and Information Building, to be built on North Campus, will become the new home of UMSI. 

As we began purging before the move, UMSI’s Marketing and Communications team discovered large boxes filled with mostly unlabeled, loose photos from UMSI’s past. These photos ranged from campus views to poster presentations, guest speaker pictures, and conference snapshots. The team worked with the Bentley Historical Library, the university’s archive, to digitize the photos so they could be preserved for future use. 

Some photos included buildings that showed how much campus has changed.

However, some photos show a clear connection between the U-M campus of yesterday and today. 

After digitizing the photos, UMSI Marketing and Communications set out to show campus then and now. Snaps of historic campus photos were taken in their original locations to show how much or how little some corners of campus have changed. These photos were created by aligning the buildings and surrounding areas in the historic photos in the same place on campus today.