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.
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!
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
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