Well, another year of saving the world one scan at a time is in the books, and 2015 was a doozy for all of us at the Digital Projects Group! But rather than give you a dry recitation of stats, we asked our friends Kara (Baylor’s oh-so-excellent metadata librarian and Friend of the Blog) and Allyson (our fabulous digitization coordinator)…
Category: Digital Collections
(Digital Collections) Memories of Christmases Past: Stories from the Oral History Collection
Christmas is a time for family, celebrating and the making and sharing of memories. Many times, those memories are presented as stories told during family gatherings (sometimes for the hundredth time), and oral traditions are an important part of any get-together. One of our most-used resources is composed almost entirely of personal stories and memories: the Baylor Institute for Oral…
(Digital Collections) Perfect Delight: The Inaugural Voices & Vinyl Concert!
After months of planning and hours of rehearsal by our friends in the Heavenly Voices Gospel Choir, our Voices & Vinyl concert was held on Thursday, December 3rd in the Moody Memorial Library Allbritton foyer. It was, to be perfectly frank, a complete success from our point of view. A sizable crowd of students, faculty, staff and passers-through filled the…
(Digital Collections) Choose Your Own Civil War Letter Adventure!
We’re currently processing a couple of Civil War letters collections – to be unveiled soon! – and getting them ready for online access inspired this week’s blog post. After reading and/or transcribing dozens of examples of 1860s correspondence, certain patterns in their organization and content began to emerge. And for whatever reason, that reminded me of a beloved book series…
(Digital Collections) All Hallows’ Eve in Poetry, Prose and Photos: Excerpts from the “Roundup” and the “Phoenix”
It’s the week of Halloween and there’s no better time to highlight some items from our University Archives collections, specifically the Baylor Roundup (our campus yearbook) and The Phoenix (a literary magazine sponsored by the English Department). First up, a poem called Halloween from the 1902 Roundup. From the 1950 Roundup A short story from the 1981 Phoenix titled Autumn…
(Digital Collections) This Is The Most 1990’s Video In Our Collections, And It Is Glorious
Oh, man. Let all that mid-90’s goodness settle in. It’s so perfect, it’s causing a Pavlovian response in my mind where everything tastes like Surge and smells like CK One and is swathed in flannel. The context on this piece is that, in celebration of Baylor’s sesquicentennial year (1995), a fundraising packet was sent to previous donors and members of…
(Digital Collections) Political Maneuvering: Updates and Changes to the Digital Collections, Fall 2015
We’re taking the opportunity of this week’s blog post to highlight some changes to one of our partner institutions and – as it directly relates to us – their digital collections. Announcing the Baylor Collections of Political Materials Digital Collections! Our friends at the W.R. Poage Legislative Library recently announced a return to their longstanding practice of referring to their…
(Digital Collections) Thrown Down, Fired Up and Glazed Over: Introducing the Harding Black Collection
How do we honor an innovator? Do we associate their name with their creation forever, like Eli Whitney and the cotton gin? Do we raise a statue in their honor? Do we put their name on a piece of currency? Around here, we make a digital collection out of their work, like we did with Harding Black. From the 1930s…
(Digital Collections) Farmers’ Wives, Insane Asylums and Dr. G.W. Truett’s Sermons of the 1940s
George W. Truett was an unrivaled master of the preacher’s art for telling an engaging story, for drawing parallels between the Bible’s cast of characters and his contemporary audience, and for recalling passages of Scripture at the drop of a mic. But even he wasn’t above falling prey to passing along misinformation, and in at least two recorded instances in…
(Digital Collections) Well Done, Sister Suffragette! Celebrating the 95th Anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment at Baylor
This week marked the 95th anniversary of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, the addition to the U.S. Constitution that prohibits denying the right to vote to any American citizen on the basis of sex. The amendment marked the culmination of years of activism and struggle on behalf of women across the country, and in the years leading up to…