Amherst | Hampshire | Mount Holyoke | Smith | University of Massachusetts Amherst

Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, 1996-1999

Overview

This is a cooperative digitization project making accessible on the Web archival and manuscript collections relating primarily to women's history, particularly women's education. The project expects to digitize ca. 25,000 items as digital page images, as ASCII text or both, as appropriate and feasible.

Comprising two pioneering women's colleges, an historically all-male (now coeducational) college, a land-grant university and an experimental college created in the 1960s by the other four institutions, the Five College consortium of western Massachusetts features institutional diversity but also a tradition of close cooperation. The primary research materials digitized in the project will come from all five academic repositories, but draw especially heavily on collections at Mount Holyoke, Smith and Amherst. They will assist students, faculty and other scholars in exploring topics such as the role and conception of women's education, ca. 1835-1970; the feasibility and desirability of coeducation; the missionary movement; and 19th-century religious revivals.

Methods

Selection

Mandatory:

• Subject relevance
• Clear ownership of material and copyright; or, copyright permission likely to be easily obtainable
• Manageable size to allow for comprehensive capture within project timeframe (no sampling or excerpts)

Desirable:

• Processed with finding aid
• Stable, with little future growth and complex reprocessing anticipated
• Past or anticipated future demand by researchers justifies electronic access
• Visually interesting
• Diverse formats (e.g. textual, graphical, motion picture)

Digitization

• Flatbed scanner (Microtek ScanMaker III) creates "archival masters" in TIFF format
• Printed materials @ 400 dpi bitonal (occasionally color); handwritten mss. at @ 600 dpi
• OCR occasionally used for printed materials (Caere OmniPage Pro 8.0)

Image Processing

• Adobe Photoshop 4.0 converts bitonal TIFFs in batch mode to grayscale JPEG or GIFs
• Image width typically 600 pixels

Display on the Web (HTML)

• Electronic collection should reproduce hierarchy and structure of original collection

(series - subseries - folder - item - page)

• Challenges: minimize file sizes for network transmission, maximize image quality for legibility
• Difficulty rendering satisfactory image quality for low-contrast mss. written on both sides of thin or translucent originals
• Metadata: link electronic collection to archival finding aid if one exists

Collection list - Mount Holyoke College Search results screen

Item inventory (Mary Lyon Papers) Typical page display

---

Project Archivist: Peter Nelson <pnelson@mtholyoke.edu>

c/o Mount Holyoke College Archives, 50 College St., South Hadley, MA 01075

(413) 538-3020 FAX (413) 538-2370

webmgr@cni.org