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About the Project
Mission
The mission of the Rose-Hulman Digital Archives Project (RHDAP)
is to digitize and make available to the public online, a portion of the
Institute’s archival material. As a member of the Wabash Valley Visions
and Voices Digital Memory Project for West Central Indiana, the RHDAP
strives to provide free research material to the public pertaining to the
history of Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology and the Wabash Valley
through a variety of formats including images, text, video, and sound.
Purpose
The purpose of the project is to:
- Provide access to these materials over the Internet, thus
removing location as a barrier to users from around the world.
- To preserve original materials from damage due to
repeated handling by users by providing a digital surrogate.
- To provide the Rose-Hulman community and Wabash Valley community with an
awareness of the types of historical resources held by the Rose-Hulman
Archives.
- To educate users on the rich history of Rose-Hulman Institute of
Technology.
- To educate users on the history and heritage of West Central Indiana by
contributing to the Wabash Valley Visions and Voices Digital Memory
Project (WV3).
- By adhering to metadata standards and best practices, and through the use
of CONTENTdm management software, materials will fully searchable and
integrated with digital materials from other WV3 member institutions.
Audience
The primary intended audience includes members of the
Rose-Hulman community (faculty, staff, students, and alumni) and others
researching the history of Rose-Hulman and the events, people, and
organization of the Institute. Secondly, as a member of the Wabash Valley,
it is recognized that this history of RHIT is an integral part of the
community’s history. Thus, users researching the Wabash Valley will
benefit by the addition of Rose-Hulman history.
History
The RHDAP began in the summer of 2001 by the initiative of
Institute Librarian John Robson. Led by the efforts of college student
Matthew Davidson, materials selected by John Robson began to be digitized
and indexed for a “home-grown” system developed by Davidson. From the
summer of 2001 to the summer of 2004, the digitization process progressed
according to the availability of student workers. In the spring of 2004,
Rose-Hulman staff was approached by members of the ISU staff about forming
a collaborative digital archives project with other regional historical
and cultural institutions to digitize and make freely available a
collection of historical materials pertaining to the history of the Wabash
Valley. The effort became known as the Wabash Valley Visions and Voices
Digital Memory Project (WV3 for short). Its founding members are Billie
Creek Village, The Eugene V. Debs Museum, Indiana State University, Native
American Museum, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, Saint
Mary-of-the-Woods College, Sullivan County Public Library, Vigo County
Historical Society and the Vigo County Public Library.
The RHDAP faced a number of challenges in joining WV3, mainly migrating
our currently digitized materials to the new content management system,
CONTENTdm. In order to be able to migrate the data in the future, the file
names for every single file transferred had to be shortened to eight
characters (not including the file extension) in accordance with the file
naming convention decided by WV3. Next, the metadata from the original
project database would not be transferable so each item had to be entered
individually with new metadata added. This was the most time consuming of
the project, especially for the Modulus yearbooks. CONTENTdm has the
ability to create compound objects that encapsulate all the JPEG images
that make up a yearbook and present it as one object, with each page
searchable in its own right.
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