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Look At These Hundreds of Photos of UT Whiteboard Doodles

Frank Meaker, flickr.com/utlibraries

With classes back in session on the 40 Acres, it won’t be long before students are huddled around books and notes, cramming for exams.

It’s a time that Frank Meaker has come to catalog – but not on a way you’d expect.

Meaker’s been with the University of Texas for 25 years; for the last 10 years, Meaker’s worked at the Perry-Castañeda Library as a maintenance specialist. Toward the end of each semester, he noticed the whiteboards in study rooms would be filled with drawings – some crude, some detailed, but all a window into stressed-out students’ minds.

“At the time I hade one of those cheaper little flip phones; I would take just a few pictures and send them to my friend,” Travis Willmann, who administers the UT Libraries Flickr page.

Meaker says as phone’s built-in cameras improved, “we started taking pictures, downloading and saving them.” The images that are family-appropriate – just about one-third of the doodles Meaker comes across – are now posted to the PCL Whiteboards page of the libraries’ Flickr account.

Its inside the mind of what these students are thinking and doing on a daily basis – from after school activities to their classwork – some of it says ‘Good luck on your finals,’ or ‘I have biology,’” Meaker says. “It’s a whole gamut of what these students are thinking and doing and their lives.”

“It’s almost like we’re in a preservation mode,” Meaker adds. “We’re preserving this history of what these kids are thinking what these kids are doing on a daily basis and what their lives are.”

Wells has been a part of KUT News since 2012, when he was hired as the station's first online reporter. He's currently the social media host and producer for Texas Standard, KUT's flagship news program. In between those gigs, he served as online editor for KUT, covering news in Austin, Central Texas and beyond.
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