When the pandemic prevented students from entering the digitization photography studio, the Digital Programs department decided to pivot to Instagram. Campbell Hannan ‘21 and Emma Candland ’23 took over what was then “@amherstdigcoll” and transformed the small, relatively new inconsistent account into @frostfinds, a vibrant account that posts daily and frequently engages with the Amherst…Continue Reading Retelling Amherst Stories in the Digital Age
Posters line the mezzanine in Frost Library, featuring a handful of portraits of members of the Amherst College community from the two hundred year history of the institution. While the library is still restricted to current students, faculty, and staff, we wanted to create a virtual exhibit of the portraits featured on campus for all…Continue Reading Amherst Stories on Display
I worked on the digital projects of the colleges archives for all but my first year as a student at Amherst College, and over time the photographs, publications, and physical objects from the last two centuries that I encountered contributed to the way I thought about the college’s history and my own role in it….Continue Reading Avery Farmer, Amherst Class of 2020
Our very first digitized scrapbook is now available! Thanks to William Belcher Whitney (1887). It is January of 2020, and this marks the ending of the more than three year Bicentennial digitization project in the library to add college history materials to our digital collection. Though we will continue to add new collections throughout the…Continue Reading Looking back with kindly eyes –
In May, we completed and ingested our largest group of material yet: series 1 of the Amherst College Student & Alumni Publications Collection. This sub-section of the collection contains many of the publications created by Amherst students during their time here at Amherst. Still to come from this collection are the majority of the student…Continue Reading Delving into Student Publications
Guest post by Avery Farmer ’20 For the past eighteen months, I have been working to digitize the Amherst College Photographer Negative Collection 1965-2005. For three hours at a time on a few afternoons each week, I shut myself into a windowless room in the basement of the library, its lights turned off to guarantee…Continue Reading Commencement Here at Amherst
In 2018 I worked closely with the Henry J. Van Lennep Collection, one of the collections that the Digital Programs department and Archives and Special Collections have selected for digitization for the upcoming Amherst College bicentennial. This chance to work with the Van Lennep collection was interesting and appealing to me for several…Continue Reading Adventures with the Henry J. Van Lennep Collection
This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of Amherst College’s Moratoria in the spring of 1969. As the library digitizes materials from our college archives, we are adding images that capture scenes from this momentous time at Amherst. These are part of the massive Amherst College Photographer Records series in the Amherst College Digital Collections. Photographs of…Continue Reading Moratorium Photographs
Guest post by Campbell Hannan ’21 In September of 1939, then-President of Amherst, Stanley King opened his convocation address in Johnston Chapel with a somewhat ominous proclamation. “This year we open with Europe at war,” he said. “What effect that war will have on America no man can tell. But that it will affect America…Continue Reading The Introduction of World War II to Amherst College
Since we officially began the Bicentennial Project in August 2017, we’ve been busy! So, where are we now? Well, back when I wrote Choosing the Bicentennial Collections in February 2018 we had decided to attempt to digitize, describe, and make available in ACDC 23 collections, either in part or full. So far, we’ve prepared for…Continue Reading What’s up with the Bicentennial Project?