On behalf of the Cavalier Daily Alumni Association, I hope that the recent tragedies affecting our nation have found you and your families safe and beginning to return to normalcy. After Sept.11, the CDAA made the decision to postpone our regular publication schedule of College Topics in order to incorporate alumni news regarding the events in New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington, DC. If you have news regarding any CD alumni who may have been personally affected by the tragedies, please do not hesitate to contact us through our website, www.cdalumni.org. We are working with Alumni Hall to stay apprised of all alumni connections to the World Trade Center and Pentagon terrorist attacks, and we hope that you can help us.

Despite recent events, the CDAA Board has had a busy six months since our last communication, and I’d like to update you on our recent accomplishments and works-in-progress.

The CDAA’s latest initiative, digitizing the College Topics and Cavalier Daily bound volumes, is getting off the ground and running. We have received an anonymous donation of $4,000, in addition to several other donations, to fund the pilot project of digitizing the first bound volume. Fund-raising is the major thrust of our effort right now, and Fund-raising Chair David Hallock and I have drafted a letter directed at several alumni-related foundations to assist us in this effort. We are currently working with Alumni Hall for content approval and strategy development to begin meeting with these organizations.

At this time, our goal is to have the first volume digitized and online for review by the end of 2002. We recognize that this may seem a slow process—it is! We are doing our best to work around current financial and technological constraints, in the hopes that as technology improves, the prohibitive costs of this project will decrease. Nonetheless, we are committed to the effort of saving these valuable documents of University history, and we will keep you posted as we progress.

As a side note, the CD and CDAA are not alone in recognizing the importance of preserving university history. Starting this year, The Harvard Crimson will spend $500,000 to digitize its entire archive so users can search all 128 years of back editions. The CDAA plans to be in regular communication with the Harvard team spearheading this effort, and to learn from their efforts.

The CDAA Board held its annual meeting on Sept. 30 during Homecoming Weekend. In light of recent events, we chose to forego our regular tailgate before Saturday’s game against Duke in the interest of coordinating with Alumni Hall’s Mid-Autumns event after the game. We hope some of you were able to join us at Alumni Hall!

As for the meeting, items on the agenda included seeing the portfolio results of the three CDAA scholarship recipients, Rachel Alberico, Josie Roberts, and Brady Wolfe, as well as reviewing the plan to reschedule the Annual CD Journalism Conference, which was postponed from its Sept. 15 date. As always, the CDAA sponsors this conference, and we look forward to holding this event at a later date for the benefit of CD staff members and other University students.

We also worked to revise our budgetary processes for our committees, set up our next strategic planning session, and have developed a first photographic draft of a plaque designated to commemorate the 1970s protests at the University in support of The Cavalier Daily. This plaque will be installed on the walls of the CD offices, displaying a photo replica of the famous protest and poster proclaiming: "The CD may suck, but it doesn’t kiss ass!" For all the times that CD staffers may feel beleaguered in their role as student journalists, this slogan has been keeping morale up for almost 30 years, and the CDAA felt it was time to permanently memorialize the event. We hope to have the plaque in place by early next year.

To conclude this report, I pass along the bittersweet news (bitter for us, sweet for him!) that Greg Trevor will be stepping down from the CDAA vice president position after 12 years of service in this role. Greg has been involved with the CDAA since his term on the managing board as the 1985-’86 editor-in-chief and CDAA executive director. Given that the CDAA was only three years old at that time, he has truly been a guiding force for us since the beginning!

Greg was elected as a full CDAA board member in 1986 and became vice president at that time. After two years in that role, he was elected CDAA president in 1988, and served in that capacity for three years. Greg resumed the office of vice president in 1991 and has held it ever since.

Now with more than 15 years of CDAA service under his belt, Greg has spearheaded a number of CDAA successes, most importantly the joint CDAA/Virginia Press Association partnership, which presents the Scholarship for Community Journalism every summer to a deserving CD staff member.

Greg has always been unflaggingly committed to the organization and its success, and I am pleased that he will remain a member of the board of directors as well as continue in his position as chair of the scholarship committee. We are grateful for his years of service, and wish him well with his newfound increased free time!

We hope to see you at the next CDAA Board Meeting, which will occur on March 3, 2002, in Alumni Hall. Best regards to you all, and as always if you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact me at dianedkrehmeyer@yahoo.com.