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….
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…