Choosing the Bicentennial Collections – Amherst College Digital Collections

One of the first tasks of the Bicentennial Working Group was to identify the collections that would be part of the Bicentennial Project. When choosing those collections, we had to balance several factors, including how closely related the topics of the collection were to the College and its history, how useful we thought the collection would be to researchers (what we called the estimated research value), and how feasible it would be to finish digitizing and describing the collection for Amherst College Digital Collections (ACDC) by the end date of our project.

In choosing the bicentennial collections, we focused on collections that were about the College rather than merely adjacent to its history. These include collections that contain a significant amount of content about the foundation of Amherst College, the administration and management of the College, the campus, College life, and statistics and information such as admission and curriculum data.

We also aimed to choose collections with such subject matter from across the time-span of the 200-year history of the College. For instance, we wanted to make available on ACDC collections with content representative of student life of 19th century, 20th century, and 21st century Amherst College students. However, there are several barriers to providing more recent content on ACDC, such as privacy and copyright concerns. Thus, collections with content that provides a broad sampling of College life from 200 years ago to today while avoiding those barriers were given high priority for inclusion as bicentennial collections. Examples of such collections include the Amherst College Student & Alumni Publications and the Amherst College Photographer Records.

man in a banana suit at a rehearsal poses — An image from the Amherst College Photographer Records. Photographs of Zumbyes reunion. (June 1999).

front cover of 1959 Amherst Literary Magazine with drawings of a green woman growing from tree roots — An image from the Amherst College Student & Alumni Publications Collection. Front cover of Amherst Literary Magazine Volume 5 Number 3 . (Summer 1959). [not yet in ACDC, but will be!]

Another influential factor in choosing bicentennial collections was the “estimated research value” of each candidate collection. Estimated research value was determined by both our assessment of the collection’s potential usefulness to researchers and our archivists’ knowledge of the past use of a collection by the college community. In that way, we hoped to include collections that we anticipated would be of high value for scholars in upcoming projects along with collections we knew were already in high demand.

The time-limited nature of the Bicentennial Project also influenced our choices for bicentennial collections. Though the library had been preparing for the bicentennial for some time before 2017, no specific bicentennial staff or library bicentennial groups were established until the Spring of that year. Therefore, the timeline for the library’s Bicentennial Project is roughly from April 2017 to our project end date of August 2020, right before the senior year of the College designated “bicentennial class.”

We had to take into account what was feasible to have digitized, described, and added to ACDC within this 3 year period. Feasibility was influenced by factors such as the level of reprocessing (if any) required prior to digitization, the size of the collection/selection of the collection to be digitized, copyright restrictions and privacy concerns, formats of materials within the collection, and our digitization equipment, technological capabilities, and staffing. Given the collaborative nature of our work, we also had to take into account coordinating the workflows of 3 different departments over the 3 years. Once we had a pool of candidate collections to choose from, our review and final selection focused on ensuring that we included a variety of content, format, and voices from across the 200-year history of the College.

Choosing the bicentennial collections was a balancing act, and prioritizing beyond those choices was another seesaw of decision! It took engaged collaboration from all members of the Bicentennial Working Group to make these decisions. We hope that we have chosen bicentennial collections that will provide representative glimpses into the 200-year history of Amherst College, inspiring our students and alumni to investigate this history and to ensure that they are influential in deciding the future of the College.

Below is a smattering of images, headlines, and documents from across the 200-year history of the College. There’s much more like this available in ACDC now, and there will be even more by our Bicentennial Year!

a photograph of several students and an instructor in a neuroscience lab — September 1974- A photo of a neuroscience lab in session. Amherst established the nation’s first neuroscience program in 1973.

title page from the 1821/22 catalog. — Title page of the first Amherst College Catalog, published in March 1822.

Front page of November 2 1974 Amherst Student with "We're Coed!" headline — Front page story in the November 2 1974 Amherst Student: after years of debate, the Trustees vote in favor of coeducation.

A photograph of 3 people sitting at a table in front of a computer. — A photo of folks learning to use Frost’s first online catalog! I wonder what they’d think of ACDC.

The 1821/1822 diagram of the rooms in South College with their room numbers and occupants (the first Amherst College students).

Image of several students in Fayerweather snack bar, some playing music — December 6 1978: La Causa occupies the Fayerweather snack bar to advocate for a cultural center.

First page of a letter from the Anti-Slavery Society to the Faculty of the College, 1834. — October 21 1834: the Anti-Slavery Society responds to the faculty’s request that they disband.

picture of a banner that states "Open your eyes, keep need blind." — October 1991: Protest banners advocating for need-blind admissions policies can be seen throughout the campus.

Front page of February 18 1970 Amherst Student with headline of "Blacks Seize Buildings" — Front page story in the February 1970 Amherst Student: Black students from across the 5 Colleges occupy Amherst College buildings in a show of strength and as a demonstration of Black community.

A drawing of fields, horse sheds, South College, and the old church in 1821 — A drawing by Mary Hitchcock of South College, the old church, and horse sheds, meant to represent what they looked like in 1821.

front cover of the 1969 Olio including a picture of students sitting on a lawn and a band playing at Commencement — Cover of the 1969 Olio. 1969 was an eventful year at the College. Student grievances around race relations, the Vietnam War, coeducation, and College governance would lead to the Moratorium, the Black Moratorium, and later Vietnam Moratorium Day.

front page of the 1855 Olio — The first Olio, published in 1855.

Amanda (aka Manda) Wise Pizzollo is the Bicentennial Project Metadata Librarian at Amherst College. Manda creates metadata and metadata guidelines for digital collections pertaining to the college’s upcoming bicentennial in order to aid discovery and access of these resources. She thinks a lot about what inclusive metadata is/could be and how we can make our organizational systems work for us rather than the other way around. Aside from her work at Amherst, she engages with the broader professional community by attending conferences, reading, and serving as a member of the Five College Cataloging & Metadata Group and the Cultural Assessment DLF Interest Group.
Manda uses she/her/ella pronouns and can be reached at apizzollo (at) amherst.edu

One thought on “Choosing the Bicentennial Collections”