Tag: General Information

(Digital Collections) An Update on the Black Gospel Music Restoration Project

If you’ve been reading the local newspapers of late – the Waco Tribune-Herald and our on-campus daily, the Baylor Lariat – you’ve seen Baylor’s Black Gospel Music Restoration Project (BGMRP) get some generous front-page coverage. This publicity has centered around last week’s Pruit Symposium, a two-day affair held at Truett Seminary celebrating the project and the impact of black gospel…

(Digital Collections) More Than the Sum of Its Parts: The JFK – Other Materials Collection

As we approach the 50th commemoration of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, we will be highlighting a number of JFK-related collections here on the Digital Collections blog. The William R. “Bob” Poage Legislative Library has become a hub for materials related to the assassination and its fallout, and we look forward to exposing those collections to a wider…

(Digital Collections) What We Did On Our Pre-Summer Vacation: News, Updates and Miscellanea from the DPG

If you follow our Facebook page (and if you don’t, we’d love it if you would!), you saw that the DPG took time the past two weeks to participate in our bi-annual “shutdown” period. We instituted this time a couple of years back to allow for recalibration, updating, new machinery installations and more as a way to ensure we’re running…

(Digital Collections) Loan, Give, Tip: How Your Materials Can Become a Part of Our Collections

One of the most rewarding parts of our work in the DPG is knowing that our efforts will lead to better exposure for Baylor’s unique collections and a better understanding of the world in which we live. The materials housed in Baylor’s special collections provide ample resources for a career’s worth of output, but there are times when even our…

(Digital Collections) “So We Can Throw These Out Now, Right?”: What We Learned From Microfilming Newspapers and How It Shapes Our Digitization Strategy

Recently, I attended a workshop for a topic mostly unrelated to my work in digital collections. At introduction time, I gave a nutshell view of what I do by saying my group digitizes Baylor’s special collections and makes them available online. Despite the whole thing taking about 15 seconds and being intentionally generic, I’ve done this intro enough times by…

(Digital Collections) Hot and Bot-hered: The Joys of Moderating Spam Comments

One of the unexpected joys of writing this blog is filtering out the spam comments we receive on almost every post. Many are garden variety garbage gathered by spambots and spit back out as “comments.” These get caught by the spam filters and deleted routinely. Others are from people hoping to use the blog as a launchpad for their own…

(Digital Collections) Go With the (Work)Flow: How Things Get Done in the RDC

One thing we’ve learned about digitizing Baylor’s unique collections is the importance of front-end planning for the overall success of a project. It’s the crucial step that separates a “well, that went smoothly” project from a “nightmare of epic proportions” project. The challenge with workflow planning is that it’s the least glamorous part of almost every project, so giving it…

(Digital Collections) The Education of a Digitization Projects Group: A Dispatch from TCDL 2012

When the Digitization Projects Group isn’t busy saving the world (one scan at a time), we’re taking time to recharge our creative batteries and hone our technical skills at various conferences, symposia and workshops. This past week, half of the DPG (our Manager, Darryl Stuhr and myself) traveled to Austin for the Texas Conference on Digital Libraries. This is the…