Research on Special Collections

7th January 2017 | Category : Special Collections

Articles and presentations about special collections.

Spotlight on Published Collections, Promita Chatterji
Published collections—whether of faculty work, special collections, or campus materials—can require extra attention. This document provides a brief summary of the major issues and presents an overview of what Digital Commons can offer.

A Modest Movie Migration: Digitizing and Providing Institutional Repository Access to a Small Archive of Motion Picture Films at a Liberal Arts College, Benjamin A. R. Tucker
This column chronicles some aspects of working with a small film archive at a liberal arts college library, including reference materials, nitrate and acetate film, vendor digitization, and access via digital institutional repository.

If It’s Not Powered Up, It’s Rotting: Transforming Archival Collections from Obsolete Platforms and CD-Rs to an Institutional Repository and Storage Array, Todd Bruns, Stacey Knight-Davis
Digital collections projects began at Eastern Illinois University in the mid 1990s. These early projects had specialized interfaces and different storage strategies. With the inception of an institutional repository (IR) in 2011, these collections were brought under a common interface and storage practices. The benefits and challenges of utilizing an IR for the dissemination of legacy digital projects is discussed, along with data storage solutions appropriate for a mid-sized academic library.

Transcribing and Digitizing Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Letters for a Historical Digital Repository, Emily Dunster, Daniel G. Kipnis, F. Michael Angelo
In the fall of 2011 the Scott Memorial Library purchased 53 letters belonging to an 1841 graduate of Jefferson Medical College, John Plimpton Green. The library staff transcribed and digitized the letters creating an online collection in the University institutional repository, Jefferson Digital Commons. This article will detail the process of transcribing and digitizing the collection along with sharing statistics and benefits of this project to global researchers.