Category Archives: Digital Collections

Digitization and the Council on Foreign Relations

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In March our ven­dor began scan­ning the first batch of mate­r­ial to be dig­i­tized as part of our grant.  We’ve sent 15 boxes (and over 15,000 pages) of the Coun­cil on For­eign Rela­tions Records to be scanned.  The mate­r­ial will be return­ing to Mudd in April and all 15,000+ images should be avail­able to any­one with an inter­net con­nec­tion later in the Spring.

The Harold Pratt House, Council of Foreign Relations headquarters, New York City.

The Harold Pratt House, Coun­cil of For­eign Rela­tions head­quar­ters, New York City.

As stu­dents and schol­ars of the Cold War know, the Coun­cil is a non­profit, non­par­ti­san research orga­ni­za­tion ded­i­cated to pro­mot­ing improved under­stand­ing of inter­na­tional affairs and to con­tribut­ing ideas to United States for­eign pol­icy.  The Coun­cil records doc­u­ment the work of peo­ple promi­nent in diplo­macy, gov­ern­ment, and busi­ness who come together to study press­ing issues in for­eign pol­icy.  At the time we wrote the grant the Coun­cil on For­eign Rela­tions Records as a whole were the fourth most requested col­lec­tion within Mudd’s Pub­lic Pol­icy Papers; researchers requested and viewed more than 1500 boxes of mate­r­ial from 2008–2011, with many more ask­ing ques­tions or request­ing copies from around the world.

The fif­teen boxes that we are dig­i­tiz­ing doc­u­ment the Council’s Stud­ies Depart­ment.  Some­times referred to as the Council’s “think tank” the Stud­ies Depart­ment spear­heads the Council’s efforts to pro­mote dis­cus­sion on issues shap­ing the inter­na­tional agenda.  The depart­ment includes a large num­ber of schol­ars and research asso­ciates who engage each other, Coun­cil mem­bers, and non-affiliated indi­vid­u­als in research on top­ics and regions related to United States for­eign pol­icy, which his­tor­i­cally have included top­ics such as inter­na­tional trade, arms con­trol, and eco­nomic devel­op­ment, and regions such as the for­mer Soviet Union, the Mid­dle East, and Latin Amer­ica, to name a few.

These records reveal the Council’s work on inter­na­tional prob­lems dur­ing the inter­war years and how, once World War II began, it almost imme­di­ately began study­ing how to estab­lish a last­ing peace upon its con­clu­sion. Though a non-government orga­ni­za­tion, CFR’s mem­bers were part of the for­eign pol­icy estab­lish­ment and the work of its study groups played an influ­en­tial role in post-war plan­ning, as evi­denced by the fact that many of its mem­bers, includ­ing John Fos­ter Dulles, attended the San Fran­cisco Con­fer­ence to estab­lish the United Nations.  In his his­tory of the Coun­cil, Michael Wala writes that “dur­ing World War II the Coun­cil grew into the role of respected advi­sor and lis­ten­ing post for the atti­tude of elites through­out the nation…In its study and dis­cus­sion groups the Coun­cil could assem­ble elites” drawn from pub­lic agen­cies and pri­vate orga­ni­za­tions who were “bound together through for­mal and infor­mal ties.”

These ties are doc­u­mented in the study group records.  In fact, many of the indi­vid­u­als whose papers will be dig­i­tized as part of the grant were involved with or spoke at the Coun­cil.  While we work towards post­ing the study group mate­ri­als dur­ing the com­ing weeks, you can already lis­ten to meet­ings and pre­sen­ta­tions involv­ing Allen Dulles, John Fos­ter Dulles, George Ken­nan, and Adlai Steven­son from our find­ing aids site.

Through­out its his­tory the Coun­cil has been sub­ject to crit­i­cism about its reach and influ­ence. In his book Wala notes that the “devel­op­ment of con­spir­a­to­r­ial the­o­ries about its reach and func­tion” is partly the result of a lack of access to doc­u­men­tary mate­r­ial.  The avail­abil­ity of the Coun­cil records at Mudd over the last decade has helped to address that lack of access and we hope that the avail­abil­ity of the study group mate­r­ial online will open these records to new audiences.

Why — and How — We Digitize

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It’s Feb­ru­ary, and we’re now in the sec­ond month of our NHPRC-funded dig­i­ti­za­tion project. In twenty-three more months, we’ll have com­pleted scan­ning and upload­ing 400,000 pages of our most-viewed mate­r­ial to our find­ing aids, and any­one with an inter­net con­nec­tion will be able to view it.

This is just the most recent effort to intro­duce dig­i­ti­za­tion as a nor­mal part of our prac­tice at Mudd. As I said in my pre­vi­ous post, we know that it’s well and good that we have col­lec­tions that doc­u­ment the his­tory of US diplo­macy, eco­nom­ics, jour­nal­ism and civil rights in the twen­ti­eth and twenty-first cen­turies. But for the major­ity of poten­tial users, who may never be able to come to Prince­ton, NJ, this is irrel­e­vant. How­ever inter­ested they may be, they may never be able to afford to visit us. And there’s a whole other sub­set of poten­tial users — let’s call them work­ing peo­ple — who can’t come between the hours of 9:00 and 4:45, Mon­day through Fri­day. Are we really pro­vid­ing fair and equi­table access under these con­di­tions? Since we have the resources to dig­i­tize, it’s imper­a­tive that we develop the infra­struc­ture and polit­i­cal will to do so.

We know that it’s time to get seri­ous — and smart — about scanning.

The ball has been rolling in this direc­tion for some time. We have three “streams” of mak­ing dig­i­tal con­tent avail­able, and with our new find­ing aids site, we have an intu­itive way of link­ing descrip­tions of our mate­ri­als to the mate­ri­als themselves.

Images of the collection in the context of the finding aid

Images of the col­lec­tion in the con­text of the find­ing aid

Our first is patron-driven digitization.

The Zeutschel -- our amazing German powerhouse face-up scanner

This is our Zeutschel scan­ner. It does amaz­ing work, is easy on our mate­ri­als, and usu­ally requires very lit­tle qual­ity control.

Archives have been pro­vid­ing pho­todu­pli­ca­tion ser­vices since the advent of the pho­to­copier. At Mudd, we have ded­i­cated staff who have been doing this work for decades. Recently, we’ve just slightly tweaked our processes to cre­ate scans instead of paper copies and to (in many cases) re-use the scans that we make so that they’re avail­able to all patrons, not just the one request­ing the scan.

A patron (maybe you!) finds some­thing in our find­ing aids that he thinks he may be inter­ested in, and asks for a copy.

If he’s in our read­ing room, he flags the pages of mate­r­ial he wants. If he’s remote, he iden­ti­fies the fold­ers or vol­umes to be scanned. The archivist tells him how much the scan will cost, and he pre-pays.

Now, the scan­ning. This either hap­pens on our pho­to­copier (the tech­ni­cian can press “scan” instead of “pho­to­copy” to cre­ate a dig­i­tal file instead of a paper one) or on our Zeutschel scan­ner. And while we feel happy and lucky to have the Zeutschel, we don’t strictly need it to ful­fill our mis­sion to digitize.

The scan is named in a way that asso­ciates it with the descrip­tion of the mate­r­ial in the find­ing aid, and is then linked up and served online. We cur­rently send the patron an email of this scan, but in the future we may just send them a link to the uploaded content.

Our sec­ond stream is tar­geted dig­i­ti­za­tion based on users’ view­ing patterns

Our friendly student receptionist, Ashley, scans materials at the front desk when she isn't welcoming patrons.

Our stu­dent recep­tion­ist, Ash­ley, scans mate­ri­als at the front desk when she isn’t wel­com­ing patrons.

We try to keep lots of good infor­ma­tion about what our users find inter­est­ing. We use a ser­vice called google ana­lyt­ics to learn about what users are brows­ing online, and we keep sta­tis­tics about which phys­i­cal mate­ri­als patrons see in the read­ing room.

From these sources, we cre­ate a list of most-viewed mate­ri­als, and set up a sys­tem for our stu­dents to scan them in their down­time when they’re work­ing at the front desk.

We do this because we want to make sure that we’re putting the effort into dig­i­tiz­ing resources that patrons actu­ally want to see — there are more than 35,000 lin­ear feet of mate­ri­als at the Mudd Library. We prob­a­bly won’t ever be able to dig­i­tize absolutely every­thing, and it wouldn’t make sense to start from “A” and go to “Z”. So, we pay atten­tion to trends and try to antic­i­pate what researchers might find useful.

Our final stream — and the one for which we cur­rently have to rely on exter­nal sup­port — is large-scale vendor-supplied digitization.

Our cur­rent cold war project is a great exam­ple of this. We’ve put together a project plan, cho­sen mate­ri­als, called for quotes and cho­sen a ven­dor. We recently shipped our first col­lec­tion to be dig­i­tized, and I’ll be post­ing infor­ma­tion to the blog as we move forward.

Another good exam­ple of an externally-supported dig­i­ti­za­tion activ­ity is the scan­ning of micro­film from our Amer­i­can Civil Lib­er­ties Union Records. Our ear­li­est records were micro­filmed decades ago and recently, Pro­fes­sor Sam Walker sup­ported the dig­i­ti­za­tion of some of this micro­film so that they could be made avail­able online.

No sin­gle stream — externally-supported projects, left-to-right scan­ning, or patron-driven dig­i­ti­za­tion — would be enough to sup­port our goal of max­i­miz­ing the con­tent avail­able online. We hope that the three, each pur­sued aggres­sively, will help us real­ize our mis­sion of pro­vid­ing equi­table access to our mate­ri­als. And we think that focus­ing on this cold war project will help us reflect on and improve all of our dig­i­ti­za­tion activities.

Mudd Library Awarded Grant to Provide Global Access to Records of the Cold War

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by: Mau­reen Callahan

The his­to­rian John Lewis Gad­dis, author of a 2012 Pulitzer Prize-winning biog­ra­phy of George Ken­nan, has stated that the Mudd Library holds “the most sig­nif­i­cant set of papers for the study of mod­ern Amer­i­can his­tory out­side of fed­eral hands.”

This may be true, but is often only rel­e­vant to researchers who have the resources to access them. We have worked dili­gently to make sure peo­ple could find infor­ma­tion about our col­lec­tions, but until now, there were only a very few ways to actu­ally study these records – come to Prince­ton, New Jer­sey and access them in the read­ing room, or order pho­to­copies of what you think you might be inter­ested in, based on descrip­tions in our find­ing aids (we also have a few col­lec­tions dig­i­tized and online, and some micro­filmed col­lec­tions of our records may be in your local library).

We want to change this to make it eas­ier for every­one to access our mate­ri­als. Thanks to the gen­eros­ity of the National His­tor­i­cal Pub­li­ca­tions and Records Com­mis­sion (NHPRC), a taxpayer-funded orga­ni­za­tion that sup­ports efforts to pro­mote doc­u­men­tary sources, over 400,000 pages of records from six of our most-used col­lec­tions will be dig­i­tized and put online for any­one with an inter­net con­nec­tion to access. We hope that our records will become newly acces­si­ble and indis­pen­si­ble to inter­na­tional researchers, high school and col­lege stu­dents, and any­one else with an inter­est in the his­tory of the Cold War.  As Gad­dis wrote in a let­ter of sup­port for our grant, this kind of access “has the poten­tial, quite lit­er­ally, to glob­al­ize the pos­si­bil­ity of doing archival research. That’s no guar­an­tee that this will pro­duce a greater num­ber of great books than in the past. What it will ensure, how­ever, is a quan­tum leap in the oppor­tu­ni­ties stu­dents and their teach­ers will have to bring the excite­ment of work­ing with orig­i­nal doc­u­ments into all classrooms.”

Col­lec­tions include:

John Fos­ter Dulles Papers

John Fos­ter Dulles (1888–1959), the fifty-third Sec­re­tary of State of the United States for Pres­i­dent Dwight D. Eisen­hower, had a long and dis­tin­guished pub­lic career with sig­nif­i­cant impact upon the for­mu­la­tion of United States for­eign poli­cies. He was espe­cially involved with efforts to estab­lish world peace after World War I, the role of the United States in world gov­er­nance, and Cold War rela­tions between the United States and the Soviet Union. The Dulles papers doc­u­ment his entire pub­lic career and his influ­ence on the for­ma­tion of United States for­eign pol­icy, espe­cially for the period when he was Sec­re­tary of State.

We plan to dig­i­tize the following:

Series 1. Selected Cor­re­spon­dence 1891–1960

Series 3. Diaries and Jour­nals 1907–1938

Series 5. Speeches, State­ments, Press Con­fer­ences, Etc 1913–1958

 

George Ken­nan Papers

George F. Ken­nan (1904–2005) was a diplo­mat and a his­to­rian, noted espe­cially for his influ­ence on United States pol­icy towards the Soviet Union dur­ing the Cold War and for his schol­arly exper­tise in the areas of Russ­ian his­tory and for­eign pol­icy. Kennan’s papers doc­u­ment his career as a scholar at the Insti­tute for Advanced Study and his time in the For­eign Service.

We plan to dig­i­tize the following:

Sub­series 1A, Per­ma­nent Cor­re­spon­dence 1947–2004

Sub­series 4D, Major Unused Drafts 1933–1978

Sub­series 4G, Unpub­lished Works 1938–2000

 

Coun­cil on For­eign Rela­tions Records

The Coun­cil on For­eign Rela­tions is a non­profit, non­par­ti­san research and national mem­ber­ship orga­ni­za­tion ded­i­cated to improv­ing under­stand­ing of inter­na­tional affairs by pro­mot­ing a range of ideas and opin­ions on United States for­eign pol­icy. The Coun­cil has had a sig­nif­i­cant impact in the devel­op­ment of twen­ti­eth cen­tury United States for­eign pol­icy. The Records of the Coun­cil on For­eign Rela­tions doc­u­ment the his­tory of the orga­ni­za­tion from its found­ing in 1921 through the present.

We plan to dig­i­tize the following:

Stud­ies Depart­ment 1918–1945

 

Allen W. Dulles Papers

The Allen W. Dulles Papers con­tains cor­re­spon­dence, speeches, writ­ings, and pho­tographs doc­u­ment­ing the life of this lawyer, diplo­mat, busi­ness­man, and spy. One of the longest-serving direc­tors of the Cen­tral Intel­li­gence Agency (1953–1961), he also served in a key intel­li­gence post in Bern, Switzer­land dur­ing World War II, as well as on the War­ren Commission.

We plan to dig­i­tize the following:

Series 1, Cor­re­spon­dence 1891–1969

Series 4, War­ren Com­mis­sion Files 1959–1967

 

Adlai E. Steven­son Papers

The Adlai E. Steven­son Papers doc­u­ment the pub­lic life of Adlai Steven­son (1900–1965), gov­er­nor of Illi­nois, Demo­c­ra­tic pres­i­den­tial can­di­date, and United Nations ambas­sador. The col­lec­tion con­tains cor­re­spon­dence, speeches, writ­ings, cam­paign mate­ri­als, sub­ject files, United Nations mate­ri­als, per­sonal files, pho­tographs, and audio­vi­sual mate­ri­als, illu­mi­nat­ing Stevenson’s career in law, pol­i­tics, and diplo­macy, pri­mar­ily from his first pres­i­den­tial cam­paign until his death in 1965.

We plan to dig­i­tize the following:

Sub­series 5D, U.S. Ambas­sador to the United Nations 1946–1947

 

James For­re­stal Papers

James V. For­re­stal (1892–1949) was a Wall Street busi­ness­man who played an impor­tant role in U.S. mil­i­tary oper­a­tions dur­ing and imme­di­ately after World War II. From 1940 to 1949 For­re­stal served as, in order, assis­tant to Pres­i­dent Roo­sevelt, Under Sec­re­tary of the Navy, Sec­re­tary of the Navy, and the first Sec­re­tary of Defense.

We plan to dig­i­tize the following:

Sub­series 1A, Alpha­bet­i­cal Correspondence

Sub­series 5A, Diaries

 

Dig­i­ti­za­tion will occur over the course of two years, and mate­ri­als will be added to the web as they are dig­i­tized. Please be in touch with us if you have any ques­tions about any of our materials.

 

The Mudd Manuscript Library Hosts its Third Edit-a-thon on October 19

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In the spirit of vol­un­teerism, the Mudd Man­u­script Library will host its third Wikipedia edit-a-thon on Fri­day, Octo­ber 19th from 12:30–4:15 p.m. dur­ing Vol­un­teer Week­end at Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity.  This edit-a-thon will pro­vide a unique, hands-on expe­ri­ence with Uni­ver­sity Archives col­lec­tions and its focus will be on expand­ing and/or cre­at­ing Wikipedia pages on Prince­ton athletics.

Stu­dents and com­mu­nity mem­bers with all lev­els of expe­ri­ence (includ­ing none!) are wel­come to par­tic­i­pate in this event.  Instruc­tions for edit­ing and con­tribut­ing to Wikipedia will be pro­vided, along with lunch and snacks. Full details of the event are avail­able on our meetup page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/Princeton_University_Edit-a-thon_Three

We ask that you bring a lap­top to work on, and, since space is lim­ited, please RSVP to .

View posts on our previous edit-a-thons:

http://blogs.princeton.edu/mudd/2012/05/she-roars-we-record/

http://blogs.princeton.edu/mudd/2012/02/wikipedia-edit-a-thon-at-mudd-library/

Please direct questions to

 

 

Redesigned Finding Aids Site Now Live

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The Find­ing Aids site for Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Library’s Depart­ment of Rare Books and Spe­cial Col­lec­tions has been com­pletely over­hauled and enhanced with many new fea­tures to make it eas­ier to search through our holdings.

We offi­cially released the site on Sep­tem­ber 4:  http://findingaids.princeton.edu

Main Page for the new finding aids site

Main Page for the new find­ing aids site

 

(The pre­vi­ous find­ing aid site will remain avail­able until Sep­tem­ber 28 at the fol­low­ing URL: http://findingaids.princeton.edu/classic/)

There are many fea­tures and enhance­ments related to the new inter­face; a few are listed below. One of the most promi­nent fea­tures is the abil­ity to view images of mate­r­ial directly from the find­ing aids:

“Thumb­nail View” of image brows­ing fea­ture in the new find­ing aid interface.

Selected Site Features:

• Deliv­ery of images directly from the find­ing aid inter­face
• Greatly improved rel­e­vancy rank­ings from search results
• Advanced faceting and brows­ing options from search results
• Con­tents lists that are sortable by title, date, or phys­i­cal loca­tion in the col­lec­tion
• A more mod­u­lar dis­play of the find­ing aids — users will not be required to nav­i­gate sev­eral hun­dred page doc­u­ments on the web (but can view the entire find­ing aid as a sin­gle page if they pre­fer)
• Enhanced topic fea­tures
• Bet­ter options for users to con­tact the library and con­nect with each other, includ­ing an “Ask a Ques­tion” (for ref­er­ence requests) and a com­ment­ing fea­ture for users wish­ing to request an enhance­ment to the descrip­tion or dis­cuss the con­tent of the col­lec­tion.
• Abil­ity to place online requests to view mate­r­ial in our read­ing rooms.
• A much cleaner, and more mod­ern, look and feel.

Sev­eral instruc­tional videos which pro­vide infor­ma­tion on using the site are avail­able online. We will be adding to the videos in the com­ing months. Gen­eral help top­ics are also avail­able, via the Spe­cial Col­lec­tions Research Account Web­site.

A num­ber of Depart­ment of Rare Books and Spe­cial Col­lec­tions staff, includ­ing Mau­reen Calla­han, John Delaney, Regine Heber­lein, Dan San­ta­maria, and Don Thorn­bury, col­lab­o­rated with Jon Stroop and Shaun Ellis of the Library’s Dig­i­tal Ini­tia­tives Group in order to develop the new inter­face. It builds on descrip­tive data cre­ated by dozens of staff involved with aggres­sive pro­cess­ing and data con­ver­sion projects over the last seven years. We’re very proud of the results and think it is one of the most advanced archival access sys­tems avail­able anywhere.

We wel­come your com­ments and ques­tions through the “site feed­back” link which is at the top of every page or the com­ment­ing fea­ture avail­able on find­ing aids themselves. We hope you’ll use the find­ing aids as much as pos­si­ble in your work and we look for­ward to your feedback.

The American Civil Liberties Union’s Early History in Documents

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Today, we begin a series of blog entries in a new cat­e­gory Amer­i­can Civil Lib­er­ties Union His­tory cov­er­ing the ALCU’s early his­tory.  Writ­ten by Samuel Walker, a pro­fes­sor emer­i­tus in the School of Crim­i­nal Jus­tice at the Uni­ver­sity of Nebraska at Omaha and the author of the only com­pre­hen­sive his­tory of the ACLU, each entry con­tains many dig­i­tized doc­u­ments along with Walker’s com­men­tary.  These doc­u­ments are part of 20 reels of micro­film that we dig­i­tized recently with Walker’s gen­er­ous sup­port and can be accessed here.

A note on the cita­tions to the ACLU Records:  The loca­tion of each doc­u­ment is indi­cated by the micro­film reel num­ber, the orig­i­nal Vol­ume num­ber in the ACLU Records, and the page number(s) within each vol­ume. Locat­ing par­tic­u­lar doc­u­ments should be fairly easy, although it will often require mov­ing back and forth between reels and volumes.

Doc­u­ments on par­tic­u­lar top­ics are often scat­tered among dif­fer­ent micro­film reels and vol­ume num­bers. This is believed to be a result of the dis­or­ga­ni­za­tion of the records that occurred when the U.S. Jus­tice Depart­ment raided the offices of the National Civil Lib­er­ties Bureau on August 30, 1918.

Despite the dis­or­ga­ni­za­tion of the doc­u­ments, how­ever, most are grouped together in a log­i­cal fash­ion. As a result, read­ers who access a doc­u­ment related to the found­ing of the National Civil Lib­er­ties Bureau (NCLB), for exam­ple, will find related doc­u­ments on that sub­ject nearby, and these doc­u­ments may be of inter­est to readers.

A dis­claimer: the text is Pro­fes­sor Walker’s inter­pre­ta­tion of ACLU his­tory and some will not agree with it. This is the nature of his­tor­i­cal schol­ar­ship, but we encour­age you to com­ment and, where pos­si­ble, cite other ACLU doc­u­ments that you find online. 

The Daily Princetonian is digitized and keyword searchable

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The Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Archives, work­ing in con­junc­tion with the Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Library Dig­i­tal Ini­tia­tives, has nearly com­pleted a mon­u­men­tal project that will change the way researchers inves­ti­gate Uni­ver­sity his­tory. The stu­dent news­pa­per, The Daily Prince­ton­ian, has been dig­i­tized from its incep­tion in 1876 through 2002. The site has been avail­able in beta for almost two years, but all issues will be loaded as of June 30, 2012. At the sug­ges­tion of The Daily Prince­ton­ian alumni board who have been among the prime back­ers of this project, the site is named in honor of the newspaper’s long-serving pro­duc­tion man­ager Larry Dupraz, and researchers are able to per­form sophis­ti­cated key­word searches that can unlock the vast rich­ness of the daily news­pa­per that doc­u­ments so much of the University’s his­tory. (For the years 2002– present, users may search online via the Daily Prince site.)

DailyPsearchsreenshop

“I wrote my final paper for my Fresh­man Writ­ing Sem­i­nar about how the pres­ence of vet­er­ans on Princeton’s cam­pus fol­low­ing World War II affected Princeton’s aca­d­e­mic envi­ron­ment and social atmos­phere,” said Jen­nifer Kling­man ’13. “My research heav­ily relied on The Daily Prince­ton­ian archives, and I had to spend a lot of time and energy search­ing for rel­e­vant arti­cles in Firestone’s micro­form ver­sions of the news­pa­per. It was dif­fi­cult to comb through the arti­cles, and as a result my research was lim­ited in scope. This spring, I wrote my his­tory depart­ment junior paper on aca­d­e­mic and social changes tak­ing place at Prince­ton dur­ing the late 1940s and 1950s. The online Daily Prince­ton­ian archives proved to be invalu­able. I was able to access the archives any­where and at any time, and use the archives’ search func­tion to find a num­ber of extremely use­ful arti­cles. My inde­pen­dent work has def­i­nitely ben­e­fited from the exis­tence of the online archives.”

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Free­lance jour­nal­ist W. Barks­dale May­nard ’88 states “I am able to write about the social his­tory of Prince­ton in an entirely new way and have restruc­tured my research to take full advan­tage of this excit­ing new resource. For my Prince­ton Alumni Weekly arti­cle on the early his­tory of auto­mo­biles at Prince­ton, the Dupraz Dig­i­tal Archives allowed me to iden­tify every ref­er­ence to cars as early as 1901, to pin­point who owned them and what kinds. I would never have attempted this arti­cle with­out The Dupraz Dig­i­tal Archives.”

Maynard’s PAW col­league, Gregg Lange ’70, reg­u­larly uses the site for his col­umn, “Rally Round the Can­non,” which exam­ines and appraises Uni­ver­sity his­tory. “You can piece together the story of Prince­ton foot­ball or Woodrow Wil­son in a dozen ways. But the unique acces­si­bil­ity of a daily pub­li­ca­tion allows more sub­tle top­ics to arise and recede, and for cross-generational tales to emerge. Be it Ella Fitzger­ald singing at a Prince­ton dance at age 19, then receiv­ing an hon­orary degree 54 years later; or stu­dent revolts against the clubs’ Bicker selec­tion sys­tem in 1917 and 1940 pre­sag­ing its loss of monop­oly in 1968, the com­bi­na­tion of detail and long view is indis­pens­able in under­stand­ing the ethos of the insti­tu­tion over time, and essen­tially inac­ces­si­ble with­out the DuPraz tech­nol­ogy and pre­ci­sion. And exis­ten­tially, if I never see another micro­fiche in my life I will die a happy man.”

May­nard added, “My reg­u­lar col­umn in PAW, “From Princeton’s Vault,” has ben­e­fited enor­mously. Recently I was able to iden­tify the ear­li­est ref­er­ences to Prince­to­ni­ans as “tigers,” which had been guess­work pre­vi­ously. It turns out we were wrong by a decade.

This has been an inter­na­tional project, with the news­pa­pers sent from Prince­ton to Brechin Imag­ing in Canada, where TIFF images are gen­er­ated using high end Ger­man cam­eras. The files are then sent via a hard drive to Cam­bo­dia, where Dig­i­tal Divide Data ana­lyzes the struc­ture of each page and uses an opti­cal char­ac­ter recog­ni­tion (OCR) pro­gram to derive machine-readable text, which allows for key­word search­ing. The hard drive is then shipped to Austin, Texas, where the US office of New Zealand com­pany DL Con­sult­ing loads the data into a content-management sys­tem called Verid­ian, which sup­ports search­ing and brows­ing, online read­ing, arti­cle extrac­tion and print­ing, and other features.

Within the library, many hands have worked for this project’s suc­cess. At Mudd Library, project archivists Dan Bren­nan and then Adri­ane Han­son have over­seen the day-to-day work of the project, man­ag­ing the ship­ment of the news­pa­pers to Brechin, as well as super­vis­ing stu­dents with the qual­ity con­trol phase. Uni­ver­sity Archivist Dan Linke raised the funds from var­i­ous Uni­ver­sity and alumni sources and coor­di­nated the project.

Within the greater Library sys­tem, Cliff Wulf­man, the Library’s Dig­i­tal Ini­tia­tives Coor­di­na­tor, took the lead in writ­ing the Request for Pro­pos­als and then select­ing and coor­di­nat­ing the work with DDD, as well as pro­vid­ing tech­ni­cal assis­tance, sup­port and vision. The Library Sys­tem Office’s Anto­nio Bar­rera designed the front end web page with Phil Menos pro­vid­ing server sup­port, and Deputy Uni­ver­sity Librar­ian and Sys­tems Librar­ian Mar­vin Bielawski allo­cated the funds to acquire the Verid­ian software.

The project employs the METS/ALTO markup stan­dard, the same used by the Library of Congress’s News­pa­per Dig­i­ti­za­tion Project, which means that as soft­ware changes and improves, we will be able to sus­tain this resource for many years to come.

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Dissertations in Dataspace policy temporarily changed

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The Grad­u­ate School’s pol­icy of hav­ing dis­ser­ta­tions sub­mit­ted into Data­Space, the University’s Open Access repos­i­tory, has been changed tem­porar­ily, pend­ing res­o­lu­tion of some out­stand­ing ques­tions. David Red­man, Asso­ciate Dean of the Grad­u­ate School, sent the fol­low­ing mes­sage out late today. If you have any ques­tions, :

Dear Direc­tors of Grad­u­ate Studies,

As many of you know, the Grad­u­ate School, work­ing with the Uni­ver­sity Archives, estab­lished last fall new pro­ce­dures for the sub­mis­sion of Ph.D. dis­ser­ta­tions to Pro­Quest. Two sig­nif­i­cant changes were: a) agree­ing to use ProQuest’s Elec­tronic The­ses and Dis­ser­ta­tions (ETD) sub­mis­sion por­tal, which greatly speeded the abil­ity of stu­dents to sub­mit their dis­ser­ta­tions; and b) elim­i­nat­ing the neces­sity of a sec­ond hard-bound copy of the dis­ser­ta­tion in favor of stor­ing an elec­tronic copy of the dis­ser­ta­tion on Princeton’s Data­Space and mak­ing the elec­tronic “sec­ond copy” acces­si­ble there. One con­se­quence of the sec­ond change was that our stu­dents’ dis­ser­ta­tions became almost instantly acces­si­ble to any­one with a good search engine. In short, Prince­ton dis­ser­ta­tions were “out there” in the world faster than we had imag­ined. This has caused some anx­i­ety and dis­tress among many of our new Ph.D.’s, so much so that we are amend­ing our pro­ce­dures in the fol­low­ing way.

By the end of this month, we will restrict access to doc­toral dis­ser­ta­tions in Data­Space to those on the Princeton.edu domain, that is, to on-campus users.

This is an interim and (we hope) rel­a­tively short term address to a larger prob­lem of easy and fast access to Ph.D. dis­ser­ta­tions at a time when stu­dents, par­tic­u­larly those in the human­i­ties and social sci­ences, are anx­ious about their oppor­tu­ni­ties to pub­lish their work and advance in their careers. The Grad­u­ate School has already had pre­lim­i­nary dis­cus­sion with some mem­bers of the Pol­icy Sub­com­mit­tee about this issue and wants to con­tinue the dis­cus­sion with them about refin­ing our poli­cies and procedures.

Thank you for your inter­est in and con­cern about this issue. If you have any ques­tions, please do not hes­i­tate to call (x8-3902) or write me ().

–David Red­man
Asso­ciate Dean

UPDATE: As of today, March 23, dis­ser­ta­tions in Data­Space are now restricted to on-campus users only. How­ever, please note that if Google has cached a PDF that it crawled pre­vi­ously, that PDF will remain in Google’s cache until Google expires it. That typ­i­cally takes a cou­ple of weeks, but that’s entirely up to Google.

UPDATE: As of Novem­ber 5, all dis­ser­ta­tions that have not been granted an embargo are avail­able via Dataspace.

Annual Report 2011: Digital Projects, Content, and Delivery

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As a con­tin­u­a­tion of our series on our 2011 Annual Report, please see a descrip­tion of our work in dig­i­tal projects, con­tent, and delivery:

  • Mudd staff con­tin­ued work to increase our dig­i­tal con­tent in FY11. We con­tin­ued a pilot project to dig­i­tize col­lec­tions using our photocopier’s capac­ity to scan directly into PDF files.
  • Uti­liz­ing OIT’s Web­space we acces­sioned over 8 GB of elec­tronic records from the Project on Eth­nic Rela­tions Records and made them avail­able via the online find­ing aid for the collection.
  • Mau­reen Calla­han inves­ti­gated the Zeutschel imag­ing sta­tion acquired last year and devel­oped image spec­i­fi­ca­tions and work­flow. We hope to imple­ment these rec­om­men­da­tions in the fall.
  • Christie Peter­son over­saw the cre­ation of struc­tural meta­data for vol­umes 3–8 of the Trustees Min­utes Dig­i­ti­za­tion Project. Related to this, work­ing with the Uni­ver­sity Secretary’s office and OIT, we began scan­ning 20th cen­tury Board of Trustees min­utes for ingest into OnBase, which will OCR them. Linke also worked with the Sec­re­tary and President’s office to reduce the restric­tion on the Trustees min­utes from 50 to 40 years.
  • The Dig­i­tal Library stu­dio com­pleted the imag­ing of the His­tor­i­cal Pho­to­graph Col­lec­tion: Grounds and Build­ings series (erro­neously reported last year), vol­umes three to eight of the Trustees Min­utes, and Mudd’s Polit­i­cal Car­toon Col­lec­tions, though these images are not yet avail­able online due to the redesign of the Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Dig­i­tal Library, and, in some cases, the inabil­ity to of the PUDL to uti­lize EAD as a descrip­tive meta­data format.
Stay tuned for fur­ther dis­cus­sion of our 2011 work involv­ing records man­age­ment, col­lec­tion devel­op­ment, exhi­bi­tions, and more.

Lights, Camera, Action!

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The See­ley G. Mudd Man­u­script Library has launched a new blog at http://blogs.princeton.edu/reelmudd/, ded­i­cated to its audio­vi­sual hold­ings. Through it, we will announce items that we have posted on Prince­ton University’s two YouTube Chan­nels (http://www.youtube.com/user/princetoncampuslife and http://www.youtube.com/user/princetonacademics). We encour­age view­ers to post com­ments that will con­tribute to our knowl­edge and under­stand­ing of these materials.

In con­junc­tion with the Library’s Preser­va­tion Office and the New Media Cen­ter, the Uni­ver­sity Archives has worked to dig­i­tize over 40 items and these, along with some films from our Pub­lic Pol­icy Papers and addi­tional mate­ri­als, will be posted on a reg­u­lar basis.