Hampshire College Course Guides 1970-Present
When Hampshire opened in 1970, common practice among liberal arts colleges was to publish course descriptions as part of the glossy college catalog. This was expensive to produce, so relatively few of them were printed, but since the course offerings did not change much from year, to year this was not a problem.
At Hampshire, however, the courses offered changed substantially from year to year as faculty developed new interests and collaborated with other faculty on team-taught courses. Hampshire pioneered the newspaper-format course guide that could be inexpensively printed in many copies and changed as completely as needed every semester. Even so, often change was so rapid that supplements to the course guides were required, sometimes several in a semester.
In 2003, Hampshire began making course guides available only on the Internet in the form of two pdfs, one a brief listing of courses, and the second containing the full course descriptions.