Walter Havighurst Special Collections

The Project

Digitizing and Transcribing the Rolls

The rolls themselves are large sheets of paper (2.5 by 1.5 feet in size) and would not fit in standard desktop flatbed scanners, so Lori Chapin oversaw the use of a Chameleon g600 Wide Format Scanner to create the digital copies of the rolls. The archival copies of the rolls are in 600 dpi TIFF files, the copies for online use are JPEG2000 files generated by CONTENTdm from the archival TIFFs.

After being digitized in the Center for Digital Scholarship, the rolls themselves were returned to the Walter Havighurst Special Collections, where John Bickers set to work transcribing and translating the rolls, compiling his work into a series of PDF documents available with each digital roll.




Developing the Collection

In consultation with Jody Perkins, Marcus Ladd created the metadata records for the rolls and assembled the collection using CONTENTdm. Once the collection was ready to be launched, Elias Tzoc modified the web interface as you now see in the Myaamia Collection Online.

The staff in Special Collections are currently in the process of adding new donations to the Myaamia Collection Online. While we are eagerly anticipating the further expansion of the collection, we wanted to commemorate the first donation of these rolls and the important piece of history they represent. With this in mind, Elias and Marcus developed this exhibit in Omeka, adapting CONTENTdm's compound object viewer as you see it here.