In support of our colleagues at The Texas Collection and their upcoming event, The Brazos River and the Baylor Achives, we’re reposting a link from last year that shows the awesome power of the Brazos River in flood stage from 1908. We encourage you all to attend this excellent event next week, and don’t forget…
Category: Texas Collection
A Club for Every Interest: The 1906 “Round-Up”
One of the great joys of my job as Curator of Digital Collections is the opportunity I get to go in-depth with the materials we host as part of the Baylor University Libraries Digital Collections. They are drawn from every special collection library on campus, and they are filled with hidden treasures both revelatory and…
Bonnie and Clyde (and Pat) and The Texas Collection Artifact That Ties Them Together
Frank Jasek, the library’s resident bookbinder and preservationist extraordinaire, wheeled the book truck into my office, his face aglow with mischief. “Have you ever seen one of these before?” he asked, gesturing to a large bound volume measuring about a foot tall by two feet wide. The words “CALABOOSE REGISTER” were stamped on its cover….
The Rise and Fall of the Soash Empire: A West Texas Hard Luck Story
Everything’s bigger in Texas, the hoary old chestnut reminds us, and no group of people understood the Lone Star State’s geographic expansiveness like the speculators who bought up acres of prime Texas land for pennies on the dollar and hoped to turn a quick profit by selling them to newly arrived immigrants and Yankees looking…
A Century of Daily Baylor History, Now Online: The “Lariat” Digital Collection
If you follow us on Facebook, you’ll recall a few weeks ago that I teased some “big news” was forthcoming. Well, the wait is over, and we’re excited to announce that thanks to the efforts of the Digitization Projects Group, The Texas Collection and the office of Student Publications, the entire run of the Baylor…
Bringing Cartography, Digitization and Texana Together for a Limited Time Via Our Digital Collections [UPDATED]
If you’ve followed our blog for awhile, you may recall a post about the special digitization equipment we utilize here at the Riley Digitization Center, including our large format map scanner, the Cruse CS-285. Well, the “big guy” got a workout this past summer when we digitized a number of rare and interesting maps from…
Join the Crowd(sourcing): Turning to Our Readers for Metadata Help
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…
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…
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…
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…