“The Assembly Series lectures exposed me to people and ideas I would have never had contact with otherwise. Often the things you experience outside the classroom make the biggest difference in your education.”
-- Phyllis Grossman, Bachelor of Arts 1966 

In 2021, Washington University Libraries was awarded grant of $34,520 from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) to fund the project Echoes of Voices Past: Preserving the Public Lectures from Washington University’s Assembly Series. This grant was part of CLIR’s Recordings at Risk initiative, which seeks to preserve at-risk audio and visual recordings. The University Libraries was selected from a pool of 100 applicants to receive one of only 17 awards that grant cycle.  

The Assembly Series is Washington University’s signature public lecture series featuring some of the most prominent voices of the late 20th and early 21st century. Under this CLIR grant project, WU Libraries digitized and preserved over 1,400 analog recordings of Assembly Series lectures. Through these efforts, this significant collection of over 70 years of recorded lectures is now available to researchers, students, and the general public.