University of Pennsylvania. Office of Alumni Records.

The Alumni Records Office has its origins in The University of Pennsylvania Fund, the first major fund raising campaign of the University launched in October 1924. In the spring of 1923, the Alumni Lists Department was created to amass the names and current addresses of alumni as the first step in preparing for The University of Pennsylvania Fund and to prepare an alumni directory to be published in 1927. The Department of Lists was taken over by the Office of the Secretary of the University in 1927 and transformed into the Alumni Records Office. The Alumni Records Office had charge over the former duties of the Lists Department as well as the creation of a biographical file of alumni, later called the Alumni Record File, and a master file of all people who attended the University.

As part of the preparations for the alumni directory, which was never published, Charles Harrison Cox, the Alumni Records Registrar, proposed the creation of the an attendance record card file which would be "a permanent authentic record containing the name of every person that attended the University, showing the department in which he is enrolled, the year in which he registered, the degree he received with the dates and his permanent class affiliations." This record, called the Alumni Master File, would not only capture the names graduates but also non-graduates of the University. The card file was updated on a regular basis and extended the attendance data back to the founding of the College of Philadelphia in 1755. In the 1970s when the Alumni Records Office, part of the Office of Development and Alumni Relations Office since the 1960s, began to computerize its operations, the Alumni Master File was discontinued and replaced by an electronic record. The last cards were updated in 1977.

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