In the same rooms where the final planning sessions establishing the DPLA were held five years ago, Executive Director Dan Cohen announced that the archive now held more than 16 million items from 2,350 member institutions and is on track to have hubs in all 50 states. The Open eBooks program, launched in 2016 to provide free access … Continue reading DPLAfest: Inclusion, Community, and Outreach
Several presentations highlighted efforts to document, preserve, and share digital collections on social justice and community engagement. Preserving African-American history on Chicago’s South Side “Partners in History: Chicago State University Archive and International Society of Sons and Daughters of Slave Ancestry Digital Collaboration,” led by Chicago State University (CSU) Archivist Raquel Flores-Clemons, Patricia Bearden, president … Continue reading DPLAfest Comes to Chicago
For the first five days of her first job out of college, as an intern for the Lake County Discovery Museum in Wauconda, Illinois, Hamilton-Smith oversaw the transfer and preservation of about 2.5 million postcards and related materials. Each item held a different degree of historical significance, none of them were cataloged, and all were … Continue reading Greetings from the Newberry Library
In “Where Do We Go From Here? The Role of Special Collections in Collecting Social Media Content,” Petrina Jackson, head of special collections and university archives at Iowa State University (ISU) in Ames, described the challenges and rewards of becoming active collectors of social media content. “Just because the format is digital doesn’t mean it … Continue reading Learning to Lobby for Your Library
Document capture at Crowley Imaging Services The Crowley Company has been providing micrographic and digital archiving services for more than 30 years. Crowley Imaging Services uses equipment from its own manufacturing arm and other vendors to offer services to libraries and archives that don’t have an in-house digitization department. The company recently purchased two Phase One IQ3 … Continue reading Saving Your Media
It holds an immersive array of whaling-related materials: more than 18,000 books on US and international whaling history and New England regional history, 750,000 photographs, a 700-piece cartographic collection, 2,400 log books and journals—the largest collection in the world—and three first editions of Moby-Dick (Herman Melville worked in New Bedford as a whaler and used … Continue reading Bookend: A Whale of an Archive
Fostering Family History Services: A Guide for Librarians, Archivists, and Volunteers, by Rhonda L. Clark and Nicole Wedemeyer Miller, offers practical advice, with bibliographical notes, on how to establish a family history service within the framework of existing programming and outreach. The authors assert that providing family history resources is more about offering guidance and … Continue reading All in the Family
The ALA Archives have been around since 1973, and Bertram—who describes herself as an “archivist through and through”—knew about the Association and “how large an impact it had on history.” But she has been especially impressed with ALA’s World War I records, which she says are among her favorite items. Also prized is a scrapbook of … Continue reading Bookend: ALA through the Ages
Libraries have always played a role in preserving local history, but that job has become more complex as the formats in which materials may be available continue to multiply. On the other hand, the technologies to digitize and post local history resources online have become cheaper and more readily available, even to small libraries. Some … Continue reading Our Digital Heritage
The do-it-yourself ethos of the local music scene tells a story of dissent from mainstream culture, says Rutgers University media studies doctoral student Frank Bridges, who played in bands and ran his own record label in the 1980s and 1990s near the New Brunswick, New Jersey, campus. He thinks it’s a story worth preserving. Bridges’s … Continue reading Rock in the Vault
Edmunson-Morton had been at OSU Libraries for seven years and had the itch to do something different. So in 2013, she pitched the idea of collecting and telling the intertwined story of hops and beer—the first such archive in the US—and within a couple of months it became reality. The first hops were planted on … Continue reading Hoppy Days
When reading your book, I didn’t know whether to be scared out of my mind about the jihadists or think it’s the greatest thing that these librarians were able to get the manuscripts out of danger. JOSHUA HAMMER: I think both reactions would be appropriate. Fearing for more than 350,000 medieval manuscripts in the city, … Continue reading Newsmaker: Joshua Hammer
