Before any sign of brick or mortar appeared on the rolling hills where someday a great university would rise, student Thelner Hoover and his camera were there. What Hoover found one sunny day in 1927 when he looked through his viewfinder was more than just empty landscape - he found his place in UCLA history as its chronicler.

Invited by a friend to attend a ceremonial event in an empty field on Sept. 21, Hoover skipped class at Pasadena Junior College to witness the birth of a new campus. As women in chemise dresses, coats and cloches and men in business suits looked on, Ernest Carroll Moore, UCLA's founder, dug a spadeful of earth.

Hoover froze that moment - the groundbreaking - for generations of Bruins to enjoy. Decades later while giving an oral history, Hoover marveled: "All the pictures I took have been published all over - every place - from that event."

For the next 55 years, Hoover and his camera captured evolving images of UCLA from the ground and the air and showed them to the world as the university's official and unofficial photographer - steam shovels clawing the earth, the skeletons of buildings rising, the all-hands-on-deck move by students from the Vermont Avenue campus, festive dedications, spirited alumni gatherings, football practices. He took pictures of campus construction, he admitted, "just for the fun of it."

As student photographer for the yearbook, the "Daily Bruin" and the Athletic News Bureau, Hoover produced nearly 1,600 images that date back to the Los Angeles State Normal School in 1925: a snowfall in 1932; an impressive parade of visiting celebrities and scholars; and John Wooden's last game. So prolific was Hoover that he was designated a "special student" for awhile so that he could keep clicking, taking only one class each semester.

Eventually, Hoover graduated and managed a photography studio in Westwood Village and went on to shoot social, business and sports events as well as distant travel destinations, earning him photo credits in national magazines. Just as devoted a Bruin was his wife Louise Brown Hoover, a leader in the UCLA Alumni Association, Gold Shield Alumnae of UCLA and Westwood Women's Bruin Club.

Recently, the UCLA Library completed digitizing 368 of Hoover's photographs to make them available online because of their continuing popularity.

"Photographs are among the materials in University Archives most frequently requested by the UCLA community and by alums, so we felt the Thelner and Louise Hoover Collection was an ideal choice for digitization," said Charlotte B. Brown, assistant head of the Young Research Library Department of Special Collections and university archivist. "It's an extremely comprehensive body of work, showing facets of university life from the late 1920s through 1960. It's also an irreplaceable historical resource."

But beyond history, Thelner was also "an excellent photographer, so the photos are enjoyable to look at from a purely artistic perspective," Brown added.

While Gold Shield has supported the preservation and processing of the collection, which includes the couple's manuscripts and personal papers, the library is seeking additional funds to continue expanding the online collection. Hoover's photographs can be seen at http://digital.library.ucla.edu/hoover.