As part of the 2026 Homecoming weekend, Elon University Archives & Special Collections hosted their annual Flashback Friday event.
Flashback Friday allows alumni to look at old student media, such as yearbooks, newspapers and scrapbooks, all organized and displayed from the archives in Elon’s Belk Library.
More than just old student media, Flashback Friday also places a heavy emphasis on unidentified media from within the archives.
Randall Bowman, an archivist and assistant librarian within Belk Library, said the photos range several decades.
“We have several binders of these, what we call unidentified photos,” Bowman said. “And we have actually a lot of them. Four large binders of photos from the 1920s to the 2000s of people that we just don't know who they are.”
Flashback Friday offers alumni the opportunity to help the archives identify these unidentified people.
“Alumni could come in, and if they see somebody they know, we ask them to write their name on a Post-It Note, which we provide too, and they can put it on the sleeve, where it protects the picture,” Bowman said. ”At some point, we'll go through them and use that information to identify these people.”
By far, the decade with the most unidentified material is the 1990s.
“I think part of the reason that we have so many things, so many photos from the 90s, is that it was the era of print photography, and digital photography had really not come around here,” Bowman said. “It was now much cheaper for people to take photographs and have them printed out.”
In addition to identifying individuals, Flashback Friday also offers the archives a way of gathering stories from Elon alumni. Bowman said these stories are valuable because of how long Elon has existed.
“We have scrapbooks from students who made them way back a century ago because back then, that was their media,” Bowman said. “Those are very valuable because they show us what life was like here in the teens, in the 20s, 30s and so on. So to get those voices more recent is also valuable because, when you’re talking about the 80s and the 90s and the early 2000s, it was a different place in some ways. Elon's changed a lot.”
Bowman believes that, regardless of when they graduated, all Elon alumni have something to offer to the archives.
“We'd love to get some of the older alumni, definitely, because Elon has changed so much,” Bowman said. “We're really interested in groups that have traditionally not been very strongly represented in archives. People of color, the LGBTQIA community, those voices that traditionally have not been well represented in archives.”
More than just stories, the archives also accept physical media and artifacts from Elon alumni.
“Last year, one of them donated, a gentleman, donated a fraternity paddle, and it went into our artifact collection,” Bowman said.
For the archives team, Flashback Friday is one of their biggest events.
“A lot of work has gone into this,” Bowman said. “This is sort of our Christmas, in a way, for the archives. This is our big time of the year.”
Jasmine Spitler, the assessment and user experience librarian, spoke highly of the work and dedication of the archives team.
“Our archives team is so incredibly hardworking, and they're doing such amazing things,” Spitler said.
Bowman hopes more Elon alumni reach out to the archives, regardless of who they are.
“One of the things that we would love to have more of are those voices, especially more recent voices,” Bowman said. “And we’d love to hear from alumni, no matter who they are, or when they graduated.”