The creation and growth of digital collections always seems to move in fits and starts. That often means months of behind-the-scenes effort digitizing items, describing them, preserving their high-resolution master files, and – finally – adding them to the access system. For us, that can involve working through hundreds of Black gospel music recordings, dozens of manuscripts for a famous Victorian poet, or meticulously scanning more than 100,000 pages of a notable Baptist publication. All of those assets eventually make their way into our Digital Collections for use by scholars around the world and right here on the Baylor campus.
This post highlights some of the notable collections we’ve created, added to, or completed over the past two years, a timeframe that saw operations disrupted by the Covid pandemic, a shift to off-site work for several months, and the need to train and employ staff ranging from student workers to temporary employees to full-time staff. We’ll post updates like these as new collections materials are added, but for today, enjoy this brief look at some of our latest resources!
Detail of center label for Columbia disc by the Seventh Day Adventists’ Choir featuring their version of “On Jordan’s Stormy Banks We Stand”, 1927
The Royce-Darden Black Gospel Music Collection
By the Numbers: 1,000 new items added, bringing the total collection to just over 7,500!
Coming soon: Items from an important collection of 78’s loaned from collector and scholar Robert Marovich. This batch will include some items the Black Gospel team identified as “gems!”
Project personnel: Hannah Engstrom
Page one of manuscript titled, “Concierto en do menor para cello y orquesta: El Hombre (The Man)” by Florentín Giménez, 1986
Composer Manuscripts Collection
Collection home: Arts & Special Collections Research Center
Focus: works by Paraguayan composer Florentín Giménez Martínez (1925-2021)
Project personnel: Alfredo Colman (on-site digitization), Ben Johansen (technology advisor), Jon Snyder (metadata)
Still image from video of Anatoly (Natan) Sharansky’s first interview on British television after his release from the Soviet Union, 1986
Keston Digital Archive
Collection Home: Keston Center for Politics, Religion, and Society
By the numbers: 88 new videos added. Digitization was outsourced thanks to an internal Keston grant.
Project personnel: Larisa Seago (video editing and metadata)
The Manuscripts of Robert Browning
Collection home: Armstrong Browning Library
By the numbers: A new collection of more than 130 items pertaining to the Victorian poet Robert Browning.
Project personnel: Laura French (metadata), Rachel Asselta (digitization)
The Manuscripts of Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Collection home: Armstrong Browning Library
Project personnel: Allyson Riley, Evangeline Eilers, Will Overton
Address portion of a letter written by Walter Savage Landor to Robert Browning, April 21, 1861.
The Browning Letters Collection
Update: Full text added to the Landor Letters (2019). The letters were digitized in 2019, the metadata created in 2021, and the transcripts were added this summer.
Project personnel: Allyson Riley and Evangeline Eilers
“The Baptist Standard”
By the numbers: A new collection of 109,806 digitized print newspaper pages launched in March 2022. The collection contains scans of all known extant physical volumes of “The Baptist Standard,” and where print volumes were unavailable, microform versions are being digitized off-site for later inclusion in the collection.
Project personnel: Evangeline Eilers, Libby Ehlers, Allyson Riley, Kat Collazo