About the Project

Earlham Digital Archives is a collaboration between students, librarians and archivists to create an online collection of digitized photographs from the Earlham College Archives.

Ford/Knight Grant

The planning for the project began in the Fall of 2007. With approval from the Museum Studies faculty, Amy Bryant received a Ford/Knight grant to sponsor a faculty/student collaborative research project on digitization during a semester long course.
In the Fall of 2008 six students from a variety of disciplines (art, American studies, French, photography, history, museum studies) completed the upper level Museum Studies course that was co-lead by Librarian Amy Bryant and Assistant Archivist Anne Thomason.

Project membersStudents in lab

Samantha Bossman
Amy Bryant
Jeana Clampitt
Catherine Jewett
Ann McShane
Emma Sundberg
Anne Thomason
Ben Valentine

The Ford/Knight grant funded the purchase of a high resolution scanner; a Microtek ScanMaker 1000XL.

Student Research

Students discussing projectStudents researched digitization theories, examples and discussed topics such as selecting materials, copyright restrictions, optimum digitization methods, and metadata standards. Student studied scholarly literature, evaluated other digital collections, reviewed “best practices” and metadata guides, and consulted online digitization reference sources. They discussed their research in regular class sessions which were co-lead by a reference librarian and an assistant archivist. Based on the research the students collaboratively created the project scope, metadata fields and digitization standards.

In addition students also conducted research into the histories of the subjects of their photographs and learned about basic web design in order to create the web pages for the collection.

Project Goals

The course had multiple goals including:
Ann McShane using the project scanner• Teaching students about digitization and the process of creating an online display.
• Identifying collections of photographs from the Earlham Archives to digitize.
• Documenting standards to create a guide for future archive and student digitization projects.
• Presenting the collection to the campus and community members during a reception in which students discussed their research process and demonstrated the collection.