Digitizing history, Steps 1-3

Heavy-duty shipping box.

OUR SCANNING PROJECT is picking up steam, and there's an impressive amount of effort involved in getting stuff out the door to the scanning agencies. We are doing this with a grant from a generous donor and taking advantage of the LYRASIS consortium's mass digitization project, which in turn is subsidized by a grant from the Sloan Foundation. 

We've counted pages and looked through hundreds of yearbooks, catalogs, journals and newsletters for paper clips, cut-outs and anything that might raise eyebrows. We've ordered a roomful of heavy-duty shipping boxes and about a mile of bubble wrap. That was the easy part. 

Now, on to the metadata -- the painstaking, exacting, boring work of making sure that all the titles, volume and edition numbers match line-for-line with what's going into the boxes. The results, though, will be amazing.

For a preview, take a look at some of the latest stuff in our digital repository at http://stmary.sdlhost.com/c/publications. We'll soon have Chalon Student News all the way back to the 1970s, along with backfiles of The Mount yearbooks, Doheny Happenings, Mount Magazine and more.

Salve Regina yearbook.

If you're interested in what a digitized yearbook will look like, check out the Internet Archive's American Libraries collections. The link http://archive.org/details/reginamaris1966salv will take you to the 1966 yearbook of Salve Regina College, now a co-ed university in Rhode Island. (As a small women's college in the 1960s, it looks remarkably like the Mount's yearbook from the same era). On the left of the browser screen are a number of viewing options.

- Posted from my iPad