Category: Digital Collections

Oppression, Visualized: New Videos Added to the Keston Digital Collection

One of our most challenging collections is housed at the Keston Center for Religion, Politics and Society. Containing materials related to religious persecution in Communist countries – most notably the former Soviet Union – the Keston Digital Collection features items ranging from anti-American propaganda posters to photographs, brochures, and other ephemera. It is an important and difficult collection to wrestle…

By the Numbers: Updates to the Digital Collections, 2019-Present

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…

(Digital Collections) Celebrating the life of Rev. Clay Evans of Chicago, Illinois (1925-2019)

The world lost a titan in the field of African-American religion on November 27 when the Rev. Clay Evans passed away at the age of 94 in his home city of Chicago. Evans was the founder and long-serving pastor of the Fellowship Missionary Baptist Church and an accomplished recording artist and songwriter. The Baylor Libraries’ Digitization and Digital Preservation Services…

(Digital Collections) Celebrating Aretha Franklin

The passing of legendary artist Aretha Franklin has elicited an outpouring of praise from around the world, including in both mainstream and music-centered journalism outlets. Everyone from Rolling Stone to Pitchfork, the Detroit Free Press and Waco’s own Tribune-Herald have paid tribute to the “Queen of Soul” since her death from pancreatic cancer last week at the age of 76.…

(Digital Collections) Visions of Rapture 2018: The Online Exhibit

The third annual Visions of Rapture exhibit celebrates the music from Baylor’s Black Gospel Music Restoration Project, specifically the 45 rpm discs that were released without cover art during their original pressings. Working with students in Prof. Andrew Baker’s ART 3333 course on Type and Design, the project showcases their visions of what cover art would look like for these…

(Digital Collections) Remembering the West Explosion, Five Years Later (Classic Post)

On April 17, 2013, the course of history for the town of West, TX was changed forever. The following day, we wrote a brief blog post on the nature of recovery, perseverance and the fleeting nature of memory, data and life in general. Today, on the fifth anniversary of that devastating day, we are reposting that article in its entirety.…

(Digital Collections) State of the Union for the State of the Art: An Update from the Riley Digitization Center

They say life has only two constants: death and taxes. But sometimes “They” forget to add the other immutable law of the universe: change. In any system, there is no such thing as complete static, total immobility, immutability. There’s always some change at work, even if it’s on a molecular level, and given enough time, it will invariably impact everything…