Northeastern University

DRS Collection Profile: The Communications Photo Archive

Several students walk around campus paths on a sunny day. A white building with a sign that says "LISSER HALL" is in the background
A photograph of students on the Oakland campus, http://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20649629. Photo by Ruby Wallau/Northeastern University. 

If you’ve seen pictures of campus happenings, then you’ve seen the hard work of the Northeastern University photographers. This team is responsible for documenting the day-to-day activity that takes place on Northeastern’s campuses, capturing everything from sporting events to researcher portraits to candid photos of students going about their day.

Matthew Modoono, Alyssa Stone, and many other photographers in the Communications Office have used their cameras to document life at Northeastern for decades. They have been recognized by the University Photographers Association of America, the National Press Photographers Association, and the New England Newspaper & Press Association, and have received several awards, including Picture of the Year and Photographer of the Year, for their tremendous skill and vision in the field of photography.

Library staff are responsible for archiving the printed photographs captured through 2010 (digitized copies are also available in the Northeastern University photograph collection (A103). Since 2010, we also help facilitate access to their digital collection in the Digital Repository Service’s Communications Photo Archive (access to the photographs in this collection are limited to Northeastern faculty and staff).

The Communications Photo Archive has served as a record of recent activity since 2015, when the Digital Repository Service first launched. Since then, the photographs stored in the collection (more than 172,000 at the time of this writing) have been viewed and downloaded approximately 400,000 times. The photographs can be seen in many places around the university, including websites, printed brochures, magazines, social media, and in the daily articles published in Northeastern Global News.

Screenshot of an article on a web page titled NGN News. The headline is "Punk rock and tacos: How a drummer turned real estate agent found restaurant success." Under the headline is a photo of a man wearing a black baseball cap and t-shirt shaking a yellow cocktail tumbler behind a bar.
A screenshot of an NGN article that features a photograph stored in the DRS, http://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20533071

Photographs in the collection capture:

Graduates throw their caps in the air under a blue sky in Fenway Park. The Fenway Park sign is visible behind the caps
Students celebrate at the 2025 undergraduate commencement ceremony held at Fenway Park, https://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20740045. Photo by Adam Glanzman/Northeastern University.

Photographs of commencement make up a large portion of the collections, with about 20% of the 172,000 photos described using the terms “graduation” or “commencement.” In fact, some of the busiest days for uploading photographs to the DRS happen during the commencement season, with photographers regularly adding more than 1,000 photographs a day.

Although the photographs in this collection are only available to Northeastern faculty and staff, the collection regularly appears in the list of the top 10 most-used collections in the DRS — a testament to how important the photos are to the day-to-day work at the university.

Be sure to check the Communications Photo Archives regularly for the most recent photos of life at the university. You can sort search results by “Recently created” or “Recently updated” to view the most current shots. You may also click the “Recently added” button to sort the entire collection by the most recently uploaded images. The “Limit your search” button can be used to limit your results by the name of the photographer or the year the photograph was taken.

Contact me or my team for help using the DRS or finding photographs in the collection. Visit the Brand Center’s Photography page for information about the photographs and photographers, as well as how you can access the photographs and use them for university business.

And please enjoy some of my favorite photographs from the Communications Photo Archive: animals on the Boston campus!

A yellow/white dog wearings a graduation gown and cap.
https://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20732128, Photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University.
A majestic hawk sits in a tree and looks to the left.
http://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20236444, Photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University.
A yellow/white dog wearing a blue birthday hat bites at a bubble in a field. The Boston city skyline is visible in the background
http://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20467241, Photo by Alyssa Stone/Northeastern University.
A small brown rabbit sits on some sticks.
http://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20452354, Photo by Alyssa Stone/Northeastern University.
A bumble bee flies above a blue hydrangea
http://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20444529, Photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University.
A white French bulldog wearing a blue harness swims in a pond next to some lily pads. The dog's eyes are closed and it looks very content
http://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20411840, Photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University.
A gray squirrel sits on top of a pumpkin outside of a sliding door.
http://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20325749, Photo by Ruby Wallau/Northeastern University.
A white axolotl with red fins swims
http://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20252465, Photo by Adam Glanzman.

This post was written as part of a series celebrating 10 years of the DRS. Check out A Decade of the Digital Repository Service and What is the DRS and who is it for? to read more about the history of the DRS.

Steps Toward Sustainability with Snell Library’s Solar Panels

Dean of the Library Dan Cohen poses next to a solar panel on the Snell Library Quad
Dean of the Library Dan Cohen flips the switch to solar electricity in a ceremony on April 2, 2024.

Northeastern University’s commitment to sustainability was evident at Snell Library on April 2, as the university held a ceremony to unveil the new solar panels installed on the library’s roof as part of the building’s ongoing renovations.

“Libraries have long been associated with light, as places that light up our world. Today, the Northeastern University Library continues this tradition by holding resources and expert staff members that shine light on learning and research,” Dean of the Library Dan Cohen said at the event. “So it’s nice that today we are able to make this association between the library and light literal in addition to metaphorical. We’re thrilled that Snell Library can capture and distribute light in a different way, and that this light will help our campus and our environment.”

The panels will be providing 157.8kWp DC of power to Snell Library and will save around 13,600 kilowatt hours of electricity annually.

The project was led by Northeastern’s Planning, Real Estate, and Facilities (PREF) Division, and the panels’ installation was completed by Ameresco, a leading renewable energy integrator. The undertaking also involved efforts by the Climate Justice and Sustainability Hub, NU Trades, and more.

Infographic with statistics on the sustainability of Snell Library's solar panels

Installing rooftop solar panels on an urban campus is a complicated process with multiple considerations to manage. Limited space and logistical complications meant that the project took nearly a year to plan and execute. But Snell Library proved the perfect location for the panels, with its height, flat roof, and minimal shading, and the ongoing renovations to help ensure a seamless integration to the campus’ electrical grid.

Four workers in construction gear pose with a solar panel on the roof of Snell Library
Some of the team of workers installing solar panels on Snell Library’s roof.

“My hope going forward is that all new buildings are going to be designed to hold solar panels so that they’re maximizing as they go,” said Jacob Glickel, Director of Sustainability Operations for PREF.

The Northeastern University Library is excited to play such an important role in Northeastern’s progression toward sustainability.

For more information about the project, visit the PREF website.

Meet the Author: Dr. Emily Fox-Kales!

On Wednesday, November 16, 2011 at 12PM in 90 Snell, Northeastern University Libraries will hold another one of its unique and enlightening Meet the Author events. Come hear author and Northeastern professor, Dr. Emily Fox-Kales, talk about her latest book, Body Shots. Body Shots exposes the scandalous yet disturbing standards centered around Hollywood and the repeating message that thin is beautiful. In her research, Dr. Fox-Kales explores how Hollywood uses films, celebrities, and social media in order to propagate obsessive weight control, self-scrutiny and vigilance, and excessive exercise. By utilizing her studies of psychology, cinema analysis, and gender studies, Dr. Fox-Kales analyzes these Hollywood values and how it unfortunately has become the norm in today’s society to obsess over weight and eating habits. During the Meet the Author event, Dr. Fox-Kales will discuss her new novel in further detail and also sign books following the talk. Books will be available for purchase at a discounted rate and provided by the NU Bookstore. This event is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served. For more information about our Meet the Author series and other related programs, click here!

Promotional Strategies?

As the title may indicate, this is a post that will raise only questions and provide no answers. I hope readers are okay with that, because it’s one of my favorite things to do. These are important questions about the Library website.  First, let me draw your attention to the intriguing organization of the Hunter College Library web page. Not only is their web page beautifully organized, I think, but they have also taken advantage of mentioning the other libraries in the same area. Hunter College is located in Manhattan and is part of the CUNY (City University of New York) system. So one of the links at the bottom-center of their page has to be the CUNY Libraries. Hunter also uses Blackboard, like so many colleges, so it has a link for that. Same with Facebook and Google. But the other three links are to the New York Public Library, Brooklyn Public Library, Queens Library. Why, I asked myself, would Hunter College want to link to institutions that are essentially competitors? There are a few reasons I can think of: 1. Hunter College believes its Library web page is more appealing than the other web pages, so it wants to place a point of comparison in the mind of the visitor. They are hoping that the visitor will be put off by the Queens Library’s web page in comparison to theirs, therefore causing the web page visitor to be more inclined to visit the Hunter College Libraries. (And it knows that the vast majority of visitors are students and faculty, who are in close proximity to their Library; other nearby territory simply must be blocked off.) 2. The Hunter College Library doesn’t care about the amount of attention its website gets, because that alone won’t guarantee more donations or visits to the actual Library. What the staff of the library cares about is the world of reading and researching, period. Any institution that promotes those habits is a friend of theirs in the grand scheme. 3. There is some New York Library web that I’m unaware of; i.e. all these libraries aren’t really competitors at all, but have arrangements where they share books and resources and common donors; Hunter feels obliged to provide links. I am not an advertising expert. But I did major in Communications; so I stand by these educated guesses.  The question simply becomes; do we want to be competitors, or do we want to find common ground? Do we want to acknowledge our connections to the Boston Library system (I think there is one, correct me if I’m wrong?)? Or do we want to take a more isolated approach to Library promotion? That last question sounds silly, because we are not taking an isolated approach. But as of now, we provide no links to libraries in the greater Boston area on our homepage. Considering the vast number of Universities here, not to mention the many branches of the Boston Public Library, we are at no shortage of these “connections.” In fact, by linking to other sites in this blog post, I am publicizing them. Perhaps we should consider these three reasons for linking to other libraries, think of some more reasons and provide links. (For the record, we do provide links to YouTube and Flickr, sites that involve us but are inherently unrelated. Do we think these links are beneficial or are they distracting?)