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…Continue Reading On Gleaning the College’s History Through Documents
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
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
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
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