Digital Collections Blog

Charting the Divine Plan: Orra White Hitchcock in the World

One of the things we often say about the archival materials we are digitizing and adding to ACDC is that we never know what researchers will do with our materials once we release them into the world wide web. The Papers of Edward and Orra White Hitchcock and Orra White Hitchcock’s Classroom Drawings were among…Continue Reading Charting the Divine Plan: Orra White Hitchcock in the World

What is Digital Programs Doing About Born Digital Material?

Throughout the past year or so, the staff of the Digital Programs department have been working regularly with our colleagues in Archives and Special Collections regarding born digital material. We define born digital as material that was created and is stored electronically. Examples can include emails, websites, social media posts, and digital photos, just to…Continue Reading What is Digital Programs Doing About Born Digital Material?

Building Collections and Connections

The work of digitizing archival and special collections material is not a “traditional” library activity. Times have changed in libraries. Change is a constant in our work – perhaps that is what hasn’t changed. Change is in the evolving materials that cross the desk of our archivists and metadata librarians as they organize and describe…Continue Reading Building Collections and Connections

Digitizing Negative Collections – The College Photographers Records Collections

This month the Digital Programs Group began digitizing the College Photographers Records Collection. The collection includes more than 400,000 negatives taken by the official photographers of Amherst college from 1962-2005; A visual history of the college for the second half of the twentieth century. Using negative collections housed in archives tends to be a challenge….Continue Reading Digitizing Negative Collections – The College Photographers Records Collections

Choosing the Bicentennial 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…Continue Reading Choosing the Bicentennial Collections

Bring your own viewer?

Lately I’ve been focusing on replacing/upgrading our zoomable image viewer in our digital repository.  The current version of the tool lacks a few features which folks have been asking for – one of which is rotation.  In an instance where you have a manuscript that has writing in two directions, being able to rotate the image…Continue Reading Bring your own viewer?

Welcome to the Bicentennial

Partial view of a page of the Amherst Student newspaper from June 6, 1968, featuring the headline "The King Aftermath: Marches, Committees and Change"

At the Amherst College Library, we’ve been preparing for the College’s bicentennial in 2020-21 for several years. We’ve prioritized digitizing materials like the student newspapers, the yearbooks, and the catalogs because they contain a rich combination of data and anecdotes about the College, its students, its faculty, and sometimes its staff for a wide swath…Continue Reading Welcome to the Bicentennial

Repositories, repair, and system migrations

Innovation and disposability… Technology innovation is a given in our fast-moving culture of social media and disposable devices, yet innovation isn’t all that drives the technology infrastructure underlying the systems we use everyday. In the library, we us many online resources driven by databases that organize, track, and deliver the content we need, when we…Continue Reading Repositories, repair, and system migrations

Welcome – what are we doing here?

In an effort to document and organize our work around building digital collections at Amherst College, this space will provide an avenue for sharing our work and connecting with the community interested in this work. This page includes background information on our process in building digital collections, where we will include technical and workflow information…Continue Reading Welcome – what are we doing here?