VRA Conference Minneapolis 2024

Hands-On blended Pedagogies: Undergraduates, Special Collections, and Digital Collection building
Amanda Matava

The Digital Asset Management Department at Trinity College has partnered with a faculty member to pilot a course for undergraduates incorporating digital imaging, cataloging, and research in order to explore Trinity's new special collection of Thai buddhist amulets. Amanda Matava, Digital Archivist, will discuss the first two iterations of the class, lessons learned, and success stories with letting undergrads get hands-on with a copystand camera and cataloging platform.

Digitization: Practical Foundations for Digital Scholarship
Krystal Boehlert and Mark Buchholz

This paper will share how the UCR Library developed and implemented the 2023 Digital Scholarship Summer Certificate program for undergraduates. Our goals were that students would gain archival and digital research skills by engaging deeply with primary sources that highlight student activism and BIPOC student voices at UCR. The workshops roughly followed the digital project lifecycle by introducing archival research, imaging in the archives, metadata and data management, OCR, text analysis, and digital exhibits. In these workshops, we specifically highlighted digitization methods with low barriers to entry and accessible OCR tools. We also included mentions and demonstrations of higher-end imaging and processing tools such as digital copy stands, RAW processing workflows, and dedicated OCR applications such as Tesseract and ABBYY FineReader, in order to give students a roadmap for more advanced digital projects and their needs. Not only were we hoping to make the invisible labor visible, but we wanted students to understand the human decisions that go into creating research materials and how they as scholars make decisions about their research outputs.

Collaborative Stewardship: Revitalizing a Small Library Collection Through Faculty Student Partnerships
John Hosford

This presentation will showcase a successful collaboration between a librarian, an art historian, and students to research, preserve, and curate a digital and physical collection of 27 brass rubbings from 1967. I will discuss the process of bringing this collection to life, the steps taken to digitize and make the rubbings accessible, and the impact this project has had on my approach to librarian-faculty collaboration. I will also emphasize the potential for future collaborations between libraries, faculty, and students to create engaging educational experiences and meaningful digital collections. The value of partnerships that focus on preserving and showcasing library collections while enabling students to gain experience creating metadata in a collection management system is invaluable. This project has inspired future collaborative projects that combine library resources, faculty expertise, and student creativity.