The OWH library special collections and archives is a treasure trove of historically significant material. The Academy was founded in 1778, and throughout its rich history the library has become the repository of rare and unique books, photographs, scrapbooks, maps, and other ephemera. These are cataloged and organized and made available for use by students and outside researchers by special collections librarian Tim Sprattler and archivist Ruth Quattlebaum. In stewarding these collections, we face the challenge of providing access to valuable and fragile materials while at the same time assuring that they are preserved and not damaged by use.
Libraries have always faced this dilemma, but the proliferation of digitization resources and technology has provided a simple and elegant solution. Making digital copies of scarce materials allows those materials to be simultaneously used by students at the Academy and scholars around the globe easily and conveniently without harm to the originals. Fragile originals can be moved from the library (which is not air-conditioned) into appropriate climate-controlled storage. The current five year strategic plan of the OWHL includes specific goals relating to the digitization of the special collections and some archival material.
Consequently, we are actively participating in the Massachusetts Digital Commonwealth project, and are studying local initiatives to develop standards and frameworks in which our projects will be carried out. As a part of this research, Tim Sprattler and I attended a program yesterday in Southboro sponsored by Nelinet, titled “Digital Projects Showcase.”
Four very different projects were presented. Representatives of a national consortium of 100 law libraries (NELLCO) described the development of an open source discovery tool intended as an alternative to expensive and problematic federated search products. The product will permit the simultaneous searching of a library’s catalog, selected free web sites, and electronic resources acquired through subscription. Because the content is pre-indexed, the search will be faster and the results will be more relevant. Mindful that our users want simplified finding aids (and that they will bypass all of our carefully-selected resources and simply rely upon Google unless we give them what they want) we have experimented with two separate federate search products. We were not satisfied with either one. We’ll be carefully watching NELLCO’s project next year as it enters the testing phase. Once the product is fully developed, the code will be freely available to libraries.
The second presentation was by representatives of the Steamship Historical Society of America. The society is currently digitizing its collections of several hundred thousand images, negatives, and motion pictures using the services of Digital Ark, a company based in Newport, R.I. The presenters described the challenges of cataloging the images, as well as in scanning degraded photographs originally created using different film types. We learned a great deal that will be helpful to us in planning our own digitization project.
Kathleen Reilly of the Berkshire Athenaeum local history department spoke about the library’s multi-year project to digitize an extensive collection of scrapbooks and photographs compiled by Edward Knurow. Knurow worked for the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, and over a decades-long career, collected historical memorabilia which eventually filled 95 notebooks. The library has indexed and digitized all of this material, and it is available for in-library use.
The final presentation introduced a digital music collection, the James Koetting Ghana Field Recordings Collection at Brown University.
Bibliocyclist 