Turning valuable faculty collections into digital teaching and research tools

Over the past three years, Williams College (Williamstown, Massachusetts, USA) has digitized 25 special collections and brought more than 30,000 images online for local and global scholarship using CONTENTdm® Digital Collection Management Software. The collections, often the lifelong commitment of Williams college faculty to their disciplines, were largely inaccessible until the Instructional Technology group led a campus-wide effort to digitize and index the objects. Now, anyone with a search engine and Web browser can discover these new digital tools.

The result? Today, researchers and students both on and off campus seek permission to use images from the collections in their research projects and published articles. To Technology Specialist Jonathan Morgan-Leamon, the requests are evidence of success and time well spent. “They verify not only the visual attributes of the objects but also that they are findable and relevant,” he says.

The effort to build online collections began in 2002, when Jonathan attended a conference at Reed College (Portland, Oregon, USA) to investigate digitization options. There, he saw a presentation on CONTENTdm. Williams College was looking for an easy-to-use digital resource management tool, something the college could host locally, export to, set up quickly—and get out of quickly if needed. CONTENTdm fit the bill, except for the part about a fast exit! “We have been very impressed with DiMeMa and their responsiveness in getting enhancements installed and bugs fixed,” Jonathan says.

Since 2003, the Instructional Technology group has used CONTENTdm to work with all areas of the campus on digital collections. The goal is to create digital tools useful for the owner of the collection, Jonathan says. “We help the collection owner identify target audiences and create the story they want to tell with their images. The library has been very involved in working with us on metadata schemas for the collections. Sometimes we work with them to develop a folksonomy that is appropriate to a collection.”

How collections are developed differs. Sometimes students do the digitization, indexing and Web pages as part of a Williams College summer internship program. Sometimes faculty members hire their own student assistants or create the digital images themselves. Either way, the projects are a partnership. “We have provided our expertise and services to help create on-campus-only collections specific to a class or professor and general purpose collections available to everyone.”

Among the noteworthy, publicly available Williams College collections:

The Costume Archives is a database of 35 costumes from the Williams Theatre department. The costumes were designed and produced at the college over the past 20 years with the help of professional costumers, drapers and undergraduate liberal arts students. Each costume was put on a mannequin and photographed at different angles to allow for 360 degree viewability and several zoom locations for detailed examination of fabrics and textures. Viewers can rotate the pictures at 15 degree intervals. Jonathan says this collection has reduced the wear and tear on the costumes by eliminating the need to get them out of the store room for classroom use and theater courses. This collection is a valuable resource that could not have happened without CONTENTdm, Jonathan said.

Picturing Our Past is a digital archive of photographs collected from current and former Williamstown/Berkshire, Massachusetts area residents that illustrates the passage of 250 years. These images from scrapbooks and family albums, attics, basements and shoeboxes are keys to the history of Williamstown—primary sources of visual information. Landscape images, portraits, cameos, structural photographs illuminate this collection, telling tales of the many different walks of life that have found their way into Williamstown. With these images indexed and preserved, it will be possible for them to remain vital resources for years to come. One unique aspect of this collection are digitized maps that display detailed township information when you run the cursor over them, Jonathan says.

The Williams Afghan Media Project (WAMP) is an online resource for exploring Afghanistan's cultural legacy, historical development and present situation. More than 6,000 photographs and slides from three special collections document Afghan history and society from the late 19th century through the Soviet occupation.  In addition, WAMP will soon have a unique online archive of videos, the most important of which are 700 hours shot between 1987 and 1989, as well as a video essay on the Taliban. Jonathan said that many of these images are very poignant, and that the publication of the first Afghan collection led to others donating their images to the project, including two collections from Louis and Nancy Hatch Dupree of artifacts from the Kabul Museum.

In the future, Jonathan says the Instructional Technology group will continue to use CONTENTdm and work with the faculty and library to bring collections online and into the Web space.

“As a community, Williams has a great wealth of collections of all sorts—video, audio, still images and real-world objects—many of which have great public interest and strong pedagogical use. These collections can move into the classroom or the public arena as valuable teaching and research tools.”