One Equal Heart Foundation is working with the Tseltal indigenous community in Chiapas, Mexico, to develop the first known Tseltal language library and archive, with the goal of preserving Tseltal language and culture. This Tseltal House of Wisdom is part of a larger community development initiative called Sistema Integrada de Información y Evaluación Tseltal (SIET), which includes a community radio station and fotohistorias-style evaluation project. We conducted capacity-building workshops in Chiapas emphasizing inventory, cataloging metadata, and digitization. We also provided recommendations on archival storage materials, and wrote a paper describing the intersection of Indigenous Systems of Knowledge and LIS theory.

The UW has over 1500 hours of historically important audio in the Milo Ryan Phonoarchive. This collection includes archived CBS radio broadcasts, primarily from the World War 2 era. Currently, it is difficult for scholars to identify materials of interest within this collection. Metadata for this collection including titles, broadcast dates, and program titles were transcribed into a printed book. In this project, the book is being converted to a fully searchable digital finding aid using enhanced Optical Character Recognition (OCR) techniques to greatly enhance the original scans.

The Judge George Bagley Collection consists of approximately 40 boxes from Bagley’s career as a lawyer and a Circuit Court Judge starting in 1895, when he passed the Oregon bar, and ending with his death in 1935. World events he would have witnessed include the World War I, Prohibition and the stock market crash, as well as significant events in Oregon history. This project started the process of digitizing the collection and uploading the images into PastPerfect5 and then transcribing the documents. Doing this makes the collection searchable for historians and other researchers.

The Perry-Mansfield Performing Arts School and Camp Archive represents over a century of Northwest Colorado and Modern Dance history. The collection consists of various formats, including photographs, correspondence, and ephemera, and measures roughly 50 linear feet. Series 11: “Scrapbooks”, includes 32 collections of photographs, camp programs, and journal entries that include the school’s founding in 1914. These objects were the focus of the preservation and access effort. The physical preservation, arrangement, and description of these materials was the first phase of this long-term project.. Development of an Encoded Archival Description (EAD) finding aid is ongoing. Next steps include focused digitization, acquisition efforts, and community outreach. Future work will allow this previously inaccessible and deteriorating collection to endure over time and supplement related collections in the region.

Since 2013 the Oregon Hops and Brewing Archives (OHBA) has been dedicated to collecting and archiving materials related to hops and brewing in Oregon. Currently, OHBA lacks a formal Loan & Digitization agreement form that addresses intricate copyright issues, and is concise and understandable for OHBA and Special Collections and Archives Research Center (SCARC) donors. To address this problem we researched the practices of similar institutions and copyright issues, created multiple form drafts, a supplemental LibGuide, and conducted a usability survey. The end product of our capstone project is a Loan & Digitization form that is organized, offers room for thorough description, contains copyright information and protects the OHBA and donors from potential donation problems. The addition of a LibGuide keeps the form concise while still providing users with supplemental information that will save the OHBA time and work in the future. The final form will be adopted by OHBA and SCARC.

The archival record of the U.S. Navy Band has suffered from limited personnel and financial resources for maintenance. The archives consist primarily of images, video footage, operational documents, and musical programs stretching back more than 100 years. As part of its commitment to showcasing history and heritage, the band sought to improve public access to its archives in the immediate and long-term future. I first surveyed the contents and selected items to be a part of an exhibit hosted on the band’s website that highlights its mission to support the President of the United States. I digitized those items, cataloged them using commercial museum software, and wrote the captions to craft the story for the exhibit. Future exhibits now have a template to follow for creation, and a general outline of the contents of the archive provide the band with guidance on how best to allocate their resources.

For over twenty years the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) has managed and developed a set of encoding guidelines for the representation of humanities, social science, and linguistics -- to preserve and share -- texts in digital form. Using Extensible Markup Language (XML) as its backbone, TEI is the generally accepted encoding model for the digital humanities. Due to XML’s extensible nature, it can often be difficult to share these files, and problematic to make them interoperable. Our Application Programming Interface (API) for TEI-XML documents addresses these challenges. It requires no prior programming experience to use, can be installed using standard File Transfer Protocols (FTP), and is able to return multiple interoperable views of a TEI-XML file using a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) as its method of query.

The Weber State University Special Collections Department is dedicated to preserving the history of its surrounding communities. The Ogden High School Archives is full of irreplaceable and fascinating artifacts chronicling the story of this more than a century old institution. Some of the archival items have already been damaged through improper storage. There has been no set process to catalogue the housed items, making it nearly impossible for community members to fully access the collection. During this project I have safely stored and organized items into labeled boxes and folders. A register of the archives will soon be available on the school’s website giving community members a full view of the collection.

The Beaverton Symphony Orchestra (BSO) is an-all volunteer community ensemble in Beaverton, Oregon. In more than 30 years, the organization has amassed a collection of more than 220 separate works, with dozens of parts for each. The sheet music library lacked any digital cataloging or inventory system, making it difficult for the music director to select works and for the volunteer music librarian to keep track of the collection. I assessed and weeded the collection, researched cataloging systems and recommended a free online option (musiclibrarian.net), established metadata schema, developed unique identifiers for parts and works, and cataloged a sample selection of music. This new system provides better management and access of the collection at no cost to the orchestra, which will assist with future programming, allow easy addition of future works, and support the BSO’s mission of providing quality, affordable classical music and outreach to the community.

A growing number of institutions are creating digital collections of historical costumes, but the same cannot be said for theatrical costumes. This form of non-traditional academic scholarship continues to go unmarked in the world of repositories with the exception of small collections of production stills. While a joint effort, there are separate elements of theatre (scenery, costumes, etc.) that should be documented with context for study and recognition to their corresponding designer(s). Constructed garments themselves are often altered and reused for subsequent performances making these pieces quite ephemeral in nature. This collection marks the beginning of Boise State University’s digitized costume collection that brings recognition not only to the designer, but also to the institution’s contribution to the theatre arts. The repository provides a means of officially publishing these records, which include not only photographs of select finished garments, but also renderings created by the costume designer himself.