Subject Guide
Related Resources
- Cardinal Scholar This link opens in a new window Provides access to Ball State's scholarly works and institutional records, including Theses and Dissertations and University Records and Publications. Note: You may need a BSU username and password to access some content.
- Digital Media Repository This link opens in a new window The Digital Media Repository offers digitized versions of a wide range of items including photographs, letters, posters, artwork, books, newspapers, and motion pictures. It also contains the Ball State University Board of Trustees minutes, building plans, course catalogs, and many other collections of university related items.
Photograph Collections
The Stoeckel Archives of Local History photographs includes over 600 photograph collections, totaling over 100,000 photographs.
A comprehensive photograph guide is also available describing photograph collections located in the Stoeckel Archives of Local History. It does not include photograph small collections or oversize photograph collections. The guide is arranged by photograph collection number. Consult Archives and Special Collections staff for information on new photograph collections and additions to existing collections acquired between updates to the guide.
Sellers, Spurgeon-Greene, and Swift History
Otto Sellers
P20-0623, taken for Citizen Service Company, March 4, 1917 by Otto Sellers
Otto Sellers was a commercial and portrait photographer in Muncie in the early part of the 20th century. He was born about 1868 in Germany and emigrated to the U.S. as a young man. He moved to Muncie from New Albany and spent ten years working in the local steel mills before becoming a professional photographer. Sellers kept written logs for many of his photographs taken between 1908 and 1926, with the information arranged by name of buyer, subject, or a related heading. To find images online, please visit the Otto Sellers Collection in the Digital Media Repository.
Spurgeon-Greene
P40-x0019, Ball Gymnasium, circa 1930 by Richard A. Greene
Richard A. (Dick) Greene was born in Richmond, Indiana, in 1903, but his family moved to Muncie while he was a child. In 1945, Greene started his "Seen and Heard in Our Neighborhood" column for the Muncie Star. When he passed away in 1984, Greene left a legacy of over 10,000 columns and almost 3,000 photographs. The photographs, which were donated by Wiley Spurgeon, and the columns provide invaluable historical documentation of Dick Greene's neighborhood - Muncie, Indiana, from the 1930s through the 1970s. To find images online, please visit the Spurgeon-Greene Collection in the Digital Media Repository.
W.A. Swift
P8-0172, Confectionary, 1922-1926 by W.A. Swift
W. A. Swift was born in Metamora, Indiana, on August 17, 1877. Swift moved to Muncie in 1918 and was working for the Delaware Engraving Company as a photographer by 1923. The Swift collection documents both the ordinary and extraordinary events of daily life in Muncie, primarily in the 1920s. In these images, we have a visual history of Muncie during the time period when the Lynds first came to study "Middletown." To find images online, please visit the W. A. Swift Collection in the Digital Media Repository.