Jonah Hinebaugh | The Crow’s Nest
By Emily Wunderlich
It’s a question we Crow’s Nest editors ask ourselves every semester.
“What volume number are we on?”
Whether you’re a longtime reader or simply a confused student, you’ve probably noticed that our volume this year is No. 53, although this is our 50th anniversary.
Why? It seems we haven’t made up our minds about whether the volume should change by semester or by academic year.
When the first issue of the Bay Campus Bulletin debuted on Oct. 30, 1969, it was Volume 1, Number 1. Joan “Sudsy” Tschiderer, who founded the paper and oversaw it during its formative years, still remembers it clearly.
“In the early years, we used the academic year, starting fresh every fall with (volume and issue numbers),” she said. “I prefer the annual designations, especially since we are now a four-year institution, which helps promote stability for student endeavors.
“Our two-year, upper-division institution (in the campus’ early years) turned over student leadership roles really quickly.”
If previous editors had stuck to Tschiderer’s system, our paper would be at Volume 48 today, since there was no publication between the summer of 1989 and fall of 1991.
But when Crow’s Nest editors published their first issue as a tabloid on Aug. 25, 1993, they apparently sought a fresh start by calling it Volume 1, Number 1.
By that logic, today’s paper would be Volume 26.
But if we counted each semester as a volume — which some Crow’s Nest editors did — we’d be somewhere between No. 100 and 150 today, including the summers when we published.
The fall of 2016 was when we got ahead of ourselves — literally.
The first issue was Volume 51, since the newspaper’s logo incorrectly said the paper was established in 1965, not 1969.
Tschiderer pointed out the error to Crow’s Nest editors, who corrected the volume number to 47, reflecting the number of years since its first publication.
And so the paper went back in time — from Volume 51 to 47 — two issues into the semester.
We’ve been upgrading the volume numbers every semester since, which is why you might notice two Volume 51s in our archive; we reached that number by counting up from where we restarted in 2016.
But if it still doesn’t add up to you, you’re not alone. David Shedden, the special collections librarian who maintains our paper’s archives, says there’s no simple answer.
In fact, The Oracle, USF Tampa’s biweekly student paper, is on Volume 57, despite it being 53 years since its debut.
Shedden has spent years chronicling the history of Florida’s newspapers, and he said “the use of numbering systems with college newspapers seem to vary.”
“These are the editorial challenges of an evolving publication,” Tschiderer said.
