Employee spotlight: Van Hope

Van Hope doesn’t have a traditional background in libraries. What he does have is more than 30 years of experience as a photographer, as well as a meticulous eye for detail, which made him the perfect fit to become the digitization lab manager for Clemson Libraries.

Located at the Library Depot at Research Park in Pendleton, the digitization lab helps campus and community partners in digitizing a variety of historic and cultural heritage materials, such as photographs, manuscripts, documents, bound materials, photo negatives, oversized materials and maps, and slides. Hope’s role is to oversee the work of the lab, providing training and guidance to the lab’s student assistants, and ensuring that items are imaged correctly. Hope joined the Libraries in 2023 and describes his career path to get here as a bit “twisted.”

A native of Denmark, South Carolina, Hope found his love for photography at age 13. He would borrow his uncle’s camera and shoot photos on trips to Riverbanks Zoo in Columbia. He learned much of what he knows about photography from his pastor, who had a darkroom in his house. He taught Hope how to develop photos and would loan him textbooks on photography and give him assignments to practice photography. Hope went on to become a photographer for his high school yearbook and decided to pursue photojournalism as a career, graduating from the University of South Carolina with a degree in mass communications in 1995.

During this time, he also served in the Army National Guard from 1990 to 1998 in the 108^th Public Affairs Detachment in Columbia. He deployed twice with the National Guard, to Turkey and South Korea.

After graduating, Hope started working for the daily newspaper in Orangeburg, The Times and Democrat, where he spent 10 years, working his way up from staff photographer to department head. After a decade in journalism, Hope decided to make a career change and moved into the corporate sector. He started working for AT&T in sales and stayed there for the next 15 years.

An avid outdoorsman, Hope wanted to move to the Upstate to be closer to the mountains. He was living in Lexington at the time and tried to get transferred to an AT&T location in the Upstate. When that didn’t work out, he started looking around for other job opportunities and saw the position with Clemson Libraries. He thought it was a chance to both move to the Upstate and get back into working with photography and imaging.

“I was ecstatic when I got the job,” he said. “It got me back into what I love to do. I have a fine attention to detail and with my strong history in photography, all of that just melded into this job. Even though I don’t have a libraries degree, I think it has just worked out great.”

One of his first projects when he started at Clemson was digitizing historic photos from the University’s history, part of Special Collections and Archives Series 100 photos. He said it was a great way to get to know Clemson, from the University’s military heritage to learning about campus.

“That showed me so much history without even looking it up,” he said. “I was just fascinated. It educated me with educating me, so to speak.”

Other projects that Hope has worked over the past two years include the Deeds Unbound project to digitize historic property records in Pickens County, digitizing items from Big Cypress National Preserve for the Open Parks Network, digitizing theses and dissertations by Clemson graduate students, and even digitizing Thomas Green Clemson’s will.

“I’ve always had an intrigue in photography, no matter what realm. Digitization is just the progression of it. We’re going from items that we hold in our hand — photographs and negatives — to a digital item that can be accessed across the world,” said Hope. “That’s another thing that’s fascinating to me. To be just a little smidgen of history, just a little part of that, to be able to say that I was able to provide this amount of information in a digital format to someone who may not have had a chance to even see it, that’s a cool thing.”

Outside of work, Hope still takes lots of photos, both as a hobby and as a freelance photographer. He also does obstacle course photography, and even traveled to Iceland to shoot an international obstacle course event. He enjoys hiking, kayaking and long-distance cycling, and is a part-time spin class instructor at the YMCA in Seneca. He and his girlfriend have three dogs and five horses.