Postcard
The reverse of this postcard has an inscription that reads, “The big man who is all ready to make a drive is Doctor Creighton.” Dr. Creighton was a Cather family physician. Thousands of new images have been digitized from the Yost Leak Postcard Collection

New Collections Added to Refreshed Online Gallery

Have you visited our online collections portal recently? With more than 2,000 objects currently online, collections.willacather.org offers Cather readers numerous ways to explore our collections, and newly launched software updates have made it even easier and faster to navigate. Improvements to the online portal include global searches, faster results return, and improved viewing features for both mobile and desktop users. 

With donor support of our internship program, we’ve also been able to undertake some special initiatives. University of Nebraska-Lincoln English major and Red Cloud native Kayce Clark spent a semester digitizing an exhaustive 1,000-piece Red Cloud collection belonging to longtime collector and Board of Governors member Jay Yost. Consisting mainly of real photo postcards (RPPC in collector-speak), cabinet cards, and Red Cloud promotional items, Yost’s collection documents every part of Red Cloud through both images and handwritten notes. 

Clark not only scanned images, but documented the organizing schema, transcribed all handwritten notes, identified photographers when possible, and organized digital files, under the supervision of archivist Tracy Tucker. With that work complete, Tucker shepherded the collection into our digital system. Yost and his husband Wade Leak provided financial support to our internship program to make the digitization possible. The first wave of the Yost-Leak Postcard Collection is now fully available at collections.willacather.org, with a second ingestion of materials coming in 2026.

Support of our online collections and our internship program provides a service to readers and to college students who are after hands-on archives and collections experience. Digitization of the National Willa Cather Center’s collections is ongoing; making legacy collections, like our WCPM photograph collection, available is a primary objective. 

To learn more about our online offerings or to support our digitization efforts, please contact Director of Collections and Curation, Tracy Tucker, at ttucker@willacather.org.