On February 11, the Library held a staff party to celebrate its transition to a new digital preservation repository. The event was part funeral—to say goodbye to the old system, adopted in 2011—and part birthday party to welcome the arrival of the new
To have a bit of fun, Kat Stefko—who is the director of the George J. Mitchell Department of Special Collections & Archives—asked ChatGPT to write a couple of poems for the occasion in the style of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Class of 1825. Cataloging and Metadata Librarian Ryan Wheeler read them aloud before two cakes (one decorated like a gravestone) were sliced and served.
The AI poem “Birth of the Digital Collections” loftily foretells a bright research future at ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø±¬ÍøÕ¾: “…A platform vast, a realm to be, where wisdom sails on endless seas. With every scroll, with every click, the past revived, both deep and quick...,” Wheeler recited.
ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø±¬ÍøÕ¾ Digital Collections houses 564 , from 2013 to 2024, and seventeen independent study projects. You can search them by keyword, student, faculty advisor, year, or subject—which can be as granular as community resilience or black hole accretion. (Digital submission of honors projects became mandatory in 2020. Until then digital submission had been optional.)
The volume of student research at ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø±¬ÍøÕ¾ recently garnered it a Carnegie Classification by The American Council on Education and the Carnegie Foundation.
Indeed, the Digital Collections is a vast platform and it is also, say ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø±¬ÍøÕ¾ archivists, a vast improvement on the former Digital Commons. First, its front end, or offers a more user-friendly interface for people on the hunt for knowledge.
And behind the streamlined facade, the tool—created by a Spanish company called Libnova—provides ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø±¬ÍøÕ¾ a flexible, immense repository to house the College’s growing trove of digital information.
“Libnova offered us an opportunity to have fewer systems,” explained Stefko. “The goal is to bring all our records together into one environment that allows searching, so we can point someone to a single system and they can look for any of our digital assets. That is the endgame that we're going for.”
She praised Libnova for its ingenuity in combining archival preservation with ease of use. “Most repositories prioritize back-of-the-house administrative functions, such as preservation of digital assets, and don't have a sophisticatednd front end or user interface. The fact Libnova allow for both of those things in one environment was highly appealing to us because it meant we could deal with fewer vendors and have better integration.”
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- 28 interviews from the
- The only of Monteverde: Ecology and Conservation of a Tropical Cloud Forest, by Nat Wheelwright, and its chapter updates
What's popular in the digital archive:
- The number one most requested item: Un Sión tropical: el general Trujillo, Franklin Roosevelt y los judíos de Sosúa, an online by history professor Allen Wells.
- The second most popular: “Geochemical and Stratigraphic Analysis of the Linnévatnet Sediment Record: A Study of Late Holocene Cirque Glacier Activity in Spitsbergen, Svalbard,” an by Graham Edwards ’14.
- “White Southerners Respond to Brown v. Board of Education: Why Crisis Erupted When Little Rock, Arkansas, Desegregated Central High School,” an by Abby Motycka ’17.
Digital Archivist Meagan Doyle’s main responsibility at ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø±¬ÍøÕ¾ is to preserve the College’s important records that are “born digital,” with no hard-copy twin. This includes the entire College’s website, which she captures at least four times a year. If real-world events, like COVID, quicken the pace of new online content creation, she'll grab it more frequently.
Doyle also scoops up ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø±¬ÍøÕ¾’s catalogues, course guides, academic handbooks, academic department newsletters, annual reports, and remarks delivered at events like Commencement, Convocation, and Sarah and James ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø±¬ÍøÕ¾ Day.
On behalf of the College archives, she collects the board of trustee minutes and votes, executive committee records and transcripts, senior officer emails, faculty meeting and committee agendas, minutes, and reports, media reports from ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø±¬ÍøÕ¾’s development office, videos, and student and faculty scholarship.
In addition, as Special Collections accepts the personal papers of prominent public figures—such as US Senator Tom Allen—these holdings increasingly include as many, if not more, electronic records as paper ones.
The College has always protected its historical trail, going back to its founding in 1794. The public can visit Special Collections and Archives, on the third floor of the Hawthorne-Longfellow Library, and request to see these records.
But increasingly, especially in the last decade, the College's records have come in electronic form. The ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø±¬ÍøÕ¾ website in particular, said Stefko, is “the primary oracle for providing content now to the ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø±¬ÍøÕ¾ community.” (The College currently uses to preserve its website but in time will migrate this system to Digital Collections.)
And the library is keeping up to ensure the past remains within reach, no matter what form it takes. “The new system opens up the opportunity for us to make online access to our collections more robust,” Stefko said.
