Category Archives: NHPRC Digitization Project

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.