During the first half of the 20^th century the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC) kept a list of the school colors of various colleges and universities and recorded this information as a generic hood lining description in the Bureau’s files, usually as a standard “chevron pattern” hood lining (e.g., “crimson with a white chevron”, “yellow with a green chevron”, “dark blue with a gold chevron”, etc.). These generic descriptions are responsible for the majority of the duplicate hood linings that appear in the published IBAC lists from 1927 and 1948. If a school contacted the Intercollegiate Bureau to request an official hood lining pattern and sent the Bureau color samples so that the precise shades of the school’s colors could be ascertained, the Bureau would assign a unique lining pattern to the school, which would replace the generic description in the IBAC record for that college or university. But many schools never had their generic patterns officially updated by the Bureau.

This may explain why there is so much variation in IBAC descriptions of Ouachita College’s hood lining, especially since the Bureau rarely used “royal purple” in its hood lining descriptions of the 1920s and thereafter, and had abbreviated almost all of the “royal purple” color descriptions in its earlier lists to “purple”. A 1927 Intercollegiate Bureau list cited Ouachita College’s hood lining as old gold with a purple chevron, but this may have been describing a royal purple chevron. A 1948 IBAC list simplified the colors, interchanged them, and described the college’s hood as purple with a gold chevron. Later, a 1972 IBAC list swapped these simplified colors again and said that Ouachita’s hood was gold with a purple chevron.