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 that background light will not affect…
Looking back with kindly eyes –
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…
Delving into Student Publications
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…
Adventures with the Henry J. Van Lennep Collection
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…
Moratorium Photographs
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…
The Introduction of World War II to Amherst College
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…
What’s up with the Bicentennial Project?
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…
On Gleaning the College’s History Through Documents
Guest post by Zehra Madhavan ’20 When I started working at Digital Collections as a Student Assistant during the spring semester of my freshman year, my understanding of Amherst College’s history was limited to facts I had read about in pamphlets and bits and pieces of information I had picked up in various lectures and…
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…
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….