The Doryce J. McDonald Papers consist of materials assembled and generated by McDonald in the course of two internship projects with the Horner Museum. One project entailed development of an exhibit for the museum; for the other project, McDonald prepared descriptions of photographs that had been transferred to the Horner Museum from the College of Forestry.
The exhibit project materials include a project paper describing the research and construction of panels for the exhibit, Forestry in Transition: Forests of the North American Far West in the Twentieth Century as well as notes, photographs, publications, and two computer disks. The photographs depict logging operations during the 20th century, helicopter harvesting, fire lookout towers, the aftermath of the 1980 Mt. St. Helens eruption on nearby forests, the mill town of Valsetz, a business formed by ex-timber workers, and the College of Forestry's "big wheels". Many of the images were obtained for the exhibit from the collections of the Oregon Historical Society and the Weyerhaeuser Corporation. The collection includes about 100 prints and 61 color slides. The computer disks are Syquest SQ800 5.25" removable hard disk cartridges (88 MBytes each). The disks include the final version (created in 1994) of the photo-documentary exhibit prepared by McDonald. These disks require migration to a digital format and are not immediately available for patron use. Please see SCARC's "Accessing Audio-Visual Content" for more information.
Detailed descriptions of the College of Forestry photographs that were prepared by McDonald for her second internship comprise about half of the collection. The original photographs were transferred from the Horner Museum Collections to the University Archives in 1996 and are now part of the Special Collections & Archives Research Center's collections.
An addition to the Doryce J. McDonald Papers (Accession 2014:078) is made up of a thesis, printed reproductions of an exhibit, and photographs depicting logging operations. The thesis, "Forests of the North American Far West in the 20th Century: Report of an Electronically Crafted Photodocumentary Exhibit," reflects McDonald's graduate work at OSU as a student in the MAIS (Master's of Arts in Interdisplinary Studies) program. In the thesis, McDonald describes the process of developing the exhibit and the research behind the images she selected to represent transformations in forestry from 1900 to 1990. Of the three reproductions of the exhibit panels, two are spiral bound and one is laminated. The eight images were aquired by McDonald from the Oregon Historical Society, the University of California-Davis, and Columbia Helicopters Inc. Most of the views document logging in the early 20th century while one shows helicopter logging in 1980.