Finding aid revamp

Thanks to my buddy Brian McDonald (Electronic Services Librarian), most of our finding aids now look like the rest of the library webpages.  [good library branding] Check it out, Valerie Saiving Papers. It took his genius to figure out how to edit the AT style sheet and make it easy for me to add an image, if I have one.  I messed with it for a while, but no joy.  I used to do a lot of html, but never got into stylesheets and CSS, etc.

I still have 7 that are in PDF format. Some are between 16 and 86 pages, so I don’t envision revamping those any time soon.  If I need to add anything to one of those collections it might inspire me.  Nothing has been added to them since I’ve been here, so I think I’m safe.

There are also three that are in the old format that I may try to update.  One is the Holiday Cards.  It was the 1st one I did using the EAD Cookbook and I was able to add all the images.  It looks like AT doesn’t let you add images easily, so I may just leave that one alone.

Hobart College General Catalogue on Google Books

I discovered that Google Books has digitized the “Hobart College General Catalogue of Officers, Graduates and Students, 1825-1897″ so I added a link to our website.

This is one of those resources I find myself consulting most often to answer questions like, “I believe my great grandfather graduated from Hobart, can you confirm that?”

It’s a great resource because it gives information on what they were doing when the book was published, as well as what awards they receives or societies they belonged while at Hobart.

Meebo on the Archives page.

I’m experimenting with Meebo on my Archives page.  When I am here and at the computer it will show me as online and anyone who comes to the page can ask a question, or chat with me.  They are private messages. (I’d love to hear from you.)

I’ll let you know what I think.  I may get overwhelmed and give it up, but somehow I doubt it.

Celebrate the Solstice!!

More on Campus Buildings

Putting the list on the history of campus buildings on the website, and posting a message to the faculty and staff listservs was by far the best PR I have every done. I was even complimented by a member of the library staff, who, I’ll bet, never had reason to look at the Archives webpage before. I think everyone on campus went in to at least look at the building they are in.

History of Campus Buildings

For more than a semester I have had one of my beloved student workers (Liz Staino 2007) working on pulling together all of the bits of information on the campus buildings we had into one list.  Today I put it up as a webpage based on that information. When I announced it on the faculty and staff listservs I instantly got positive feedback.

You see when I arrived there was this notebook…  It had a typed list of the buildings about in the order of the current list. (organized by date built) Much of the information came from that list.  But it also had articles from student newspapers, alumni newsletters, individual building histories done by the Druid Society (Hobart Sr. honor society) and the miscellaneous list that seemed to come from buildings and grounds.

Liz pulled all those together for me, and organized “the notebook” with dividers.  She also checked the current Colleges’ webpage for more information and documented where the information came from.  I then formatted the whole thing for the web, and went through the current campus directory to verify addresses and add theme house information to student housing.

A big thank you to Liz.  I believe this page will be well used.

Get the Electronic Services Librarian on your side. :-)

Kathryn Fredrick, our Electronic Services Librarian, just walked in and said, “I woke up Sunday morning thinking, wouldn’t it be neat to have a search box on the Archives webpage that would do a Voyager search already limited to archives.”

My answer? “*#$% YEAH!”

She is going to send me the coding to add to the page.  You will be able to search, keyword, author, title, or subject.  I can’t wait.

Kathryn is so great.  For the most part it seems like the colleges and most of the library don’t know we exist, and here she is thinking of us in her sleep.

Awesome Webpage update.

I asked our electronic services librarian, Kathryn Frederick, if she could help add randomized photos to the Archives webpage. And boy did she!!  Now everytime the page is refreshed a different photo from our digitized photo collection comes up.  I’m very pleased with the results!!! Check it out. http://academic.hws.edu/library/archives/ She also added the title and date below the photo and if you click on the photo it takes you to the catalog record.  Huzzah Kathryn!!!

WNYLRC Digitization Expo and Vendor Showcase

I went to the digitization expo yesterday and I’m back with lots to think about. I think it helped be get over my “post-vacation depression.” Plus I got to see a number of people I haven’t run into in a while, and had a fun lunch.

I listened to four presentations and chatted with vendors. The fun is that I don’t seem to come back with facts to share but with ideas for projects. Here are the thoughts I scribbled all over my program. I’m interested in comments on how to proceed, or any other good ideas.

• Have the images on my homepage change each time someone accesses it. We have about 1/3 of the photo collection online now, there must be a way to do this.
• Add online exhibits to my page to create interest in special collections.
• Does it matter if scanned photos are not in order on the CD’s? They are on the server and can be searched there by call number. That means, if I get a request for a scan, why not just stick in on whatever the current CD is? Or I guess I could to a folder for requested scans and put them all one one CD. What do you think?
• We have been saving photos in TIFF format then re-saving as JPEG in two different sizes, display and thumbnail. Apparently it’s possible with some systems to convert for TIFF to JPEG2000 on the fly when uploading. That is worth tracking down.
• I have students newspapers that need to be microfilmed. Now they can microfilm, digitize, OCR and index them at the same time. Perhaps we should look for money to do the old microfilm as well. I can see it being used a lot!
• But then I believe we have a microfilm scanner upstairs somewhere. Perhaps I could put a student to scanning them. That’s step one at least.

Look at that, years of work from listening to Angela O’Neal of the Ohio Memory project, Pam O’Sullivan of Rochester Images, Peter Verheyen and Nicolette Schneider of SU Digital Projects and Stacy Person of UBdigit, and chatting with a few vendors.

Thanks WNYLRC!