One of the most exciting trends in digital collections of late has been the emergence of “crowdsourcing.” The idea is simple: post some images about which you know nothing (or very little) and turn to the collective knowledge of a user group – say, a Facebook page or Twitter followers – for help. Using the…
Category: Collections
Guest Post: Sierra Wilson, Our 2012 Summer Intern
Welcome to our first guest post here on the BU Libraries Digital Collections blog! We’re excited to welcome Sierra Wilson, a graduate student from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign studying Library and Information Science. Sierra has been with us this summer working as an intern. Her assignment: the sprawling Baylor University News Releases…
Hidden in Plain Sight: A Springtime Brazos Flood, 1908
For residents of early twentieth-century Waco, the Brazos River was a study in contrasts. It provided a reliable source of potable water for myriad daily uses, but its temperamental nature made it prone to violent floods that damaged property and took lives. The Brazos could be both savior and destroyer, a source of community pride…
“A Long-time Minister of the Gospel and a Great Leader in Our Southern Baptist Convention”: The Selsus E. Tull Collection
The newest addition to the Baylor University Libraries Digital Collections is a fascinating archival collection long housed in the Moody Memorial Library: the sermons and papers of Dr. Selsus E. Tull, a Baptist minister with more than a half-century of service to Southern churches and an influential member of the Southern Baptist Convention. Tull was…
Stop the Presses, Start the Scanners: Digitizing Baylor’s News Release Archive
It’s hard to imagine given the pervasive nature of the media outlets available today – from the major broadcast networks, cable news networks, blogs, microblogs, social media avenues and more – but there was a time when the concept of a press release didn’t exist. The content readers found in their daily newspaper or heard…
Getting to Know the Black Gospel Music Restoration Project (BGMRP)
One of our bigger projects here at the Digitization Projects Group is the Black Gospel Music Restoration Project (BGMRP). Established in 2008, it seeks to preserve America’s proud tradition of black gospel music through digitization, access, and new research. From the earliest days of the project, we established a blog for interested parties to track…
Scott Joplin’s “Great Crush Collision March” and the Memorialization of a Marketing Spectacle
For most people, the name Scott Joplin brings up a common range of responses: ragtime music, the Maple Leaf Rag, and his opera Treemonisha. But you’d be hard pressed to find someone whose first reaction to hearing Joplin’s name would be, “Oh, he’s the guy who wrote the song about the staged train crash near…
Hidden in Plain Sight: The Students of Baylor University, 1920
Photo of Baylor University students taken on Burleson Quadrangle, February 26, 1920 (Click photo to enlarge) This installment of “Hidden in Plain Sight” features a group photo of Baylor students posed on risers on the Carroll Science Building side of the Burleson Quadrangle. The photographer – P.N. Fry of Kansas City, Missouri – would have…
A Post for the Statisticians in the Audience (Or, Who’s Been Looking at Our Stuff?)
The phenomenal success of the Browning Letters Project did more than just expose the world to the first digitized images of more than 1,400 pieces of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s correspondence. It also exposed the server that hosts the collection to more than 1,000,000 page views in just three days! In fact, over the…
Spring Hats, Julius Caesar and Marriage Proposals: Leap Day Through the Front Pages of the “Lariat”, 1904-1988
Today is February 29th, which of course means it’s Leap Day, the extra day added to the calendar every four years to make up for the fraction of an extra day we experience beyond the standard 24 hours. Over the course of four years, those fractions add up to another full day, so we add…
Hidden in Plain Sight: Looking Closer at the Diamond Jubilee, Baylor University, 1920
Baylor University was in the mood to celebrate in 1920, for that was the year of its diamond jubilee. Seventy-five years earlier, in the Washington County town of Independence, the university was established and named for Judge R.E.B. Baylor; the ensuing decades had seen it grow into a thriving institution in a new city, Waco….
“How do I love thee?” Let Us Digitize the Ways!
They were written between two of the most famous names in Victorian poetry, spanning a famous courtship, an elopement to Italy, and a widower’s final years. They were preserved by two institutions of higher education in the United States, one a private liberal arts college in the Northeast, the other a private Baptist university in…