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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Mrs. Neff’s Portrait: Or, The Things We Scan That Aren’t Online
If you’re a regular reader of this blog,* you know we feature items in this space that are drawn from our digital collections that we believe are unique, interesting or otherwise worthy of added exposure. And for that purpose, we have more than 35,000 objects online to write about – more than enough to keep…
Everyone’s a Curator!
There was a time in the not so distant past when the word “curator” wasn’t heard much outside the polished marble halls of the world’s museums. People imagined curators as bespectacled, retiring types who, armed with a PhD in art history or some obscure subset of archaeology, would arrange items in a back room until…
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…
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Just a quick note to tip you off to a feature we’ve enabled here at the Digital Collections blog: subscribe via email! Look over in the right-hand sidebar and find the “subscribe by email” box. Just enter your email address and hit submit, and you’ll be on your way to emailed updates every time we…