When I was thinking about what I wanted to write for this post, it occurred to me to talk about my interaction with the collections we have here, outside of my official role as a software developer. In my role here, I'm responsible for the images and metadata getting ingested into our digital asset management system and also keeping that website going day to day. Thinking about this work made me ask myself the question: how has working here changed me? Or, better yet, what are the side effects of this position on my interests? Generally side effects are unwanted […]
Guest post by Zehra Madhavan '20 When I started working at Digital Collections as a Student Assistant during the spring semester of my freshman year, my understanding of Amherst College's history was limited to facts I had read about in pamphlets and bits and pieces of information I had picked up in various lectures and speeches; little did I know that I would soon be encountering countless documents and archival items that would shape not only the way I see the college but also the way I see my place in this community. The project I have been working on […]
Behind the letters, images, photographs, and other treasures on display in Amherst College Digital Collections is software. To the public, this software is largely invisible, with our user interface showcasing the discovery and display of the digital objects from Archives and Special Collections. Our underlying software infrastructure requires ongoing maintenance, upkeep, and upgrade as technology changes and our needs change. I'm here today to share a choice we've made for the future of our digital collections software, which is that we are going to start using Islandora in our software stack. This month we are beginning the process to migrate […]
One of the things we often say about the archival materials we are digitizing and adding to ACDC is that we never know what researchers will do with our materials once we release them into the world wide web. The Papers of Edward and Orra White Hitchcock and Orra White Hitchcock's Classroom Drawings were among the earliest collections we made available through ACDC in late 2012/early 2013. It is amazing to see just how far Orra White Hitchcock's works have traveled since then, both digitally and physically. The news of the moment is that the largest exhibition ever mounted of […]
Guest post by Avery Farmer '20 When I visited the British Royal Observatory in Greenwich during a vacation in London this year, I was captivated by a series of rooms dedicated to a history of time. Not time, the grand spiritual and scientific setting of our own existence, but humans' attempts in the last 500 years to measure that constant force. On display were indecipherable jumbles of pendulums, springs, and gears, exposed or half-concealed by elegant metal dials, each new model claiming some slight advantage over the last. The placards described innovations like a redesigned spring that made an early […]
The work of digitizing archival and special collections material is not a "traditional" library activity. Times have changed in libraries. Change is a constant in our work - perhaps that is what hasn't changed. Change is in the evolving materials that cross the desk of our archivists and metadata librarians as they organize and describe what is before them. Change is represented in the digital files with endless strings of names and numbers that fill the hard drives in our digital studio and compose the content of our digital repository servers. Change is new, too, in that we no longer […]
Lately I've been focusing on replacing/upgrading our zoomable image viewer in our digital repository. The current version of the tool lacks a few features which folks have been asking for - one of which is rotation. In an instance where you have a manuscript that has writing in two directions, being able to rotate the image is a highly desired feature. Having heard about this set of standards for image viewing, I started researching the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF). I'll share a little bit of my learning with you here. Honestly, looking at IIIF made me start to dream. We […]