HIST A202 The Historian's Craft: Searching Digital University Archives

Hi! I'm Andrew Lau and I am the Digital Collections Librarian / Archivist in the Monroe Library. I work with the Special Collections and Archives (SCA) with a focus on digital collections and archives, digital scholarship, scholarly communications, among other functions relating to digital/digitized materials. I’m also the librarian liaison to Art & Art History, Design, and Theater Arts & Dance. Part of my role here at Loyola is to work on our various digital collections and archives projects, including our digitization efforts where we take photos, videos, letters, newspapers, books, and other materials from our special collections and archives and put them online.
 

The process of digitization encompasses much more than just scanning objects and posting them to a website. This is an example of a digitization workflow from the Smithsonian. You can see from this how complex the process of getting archival materials online actually is.

Some of the most basic steps involved in digitization are the following:

• First, we have to assess the physical object. What is its condition? Is it safe to digitize, or will we possibly damage it in the process? Is it in the public domain? Or is it copyrighted, and therefore we might not be able to make it freely available online?
• Next, we create a basic description for the object. We have to ask, is this a unique item that no one else has? Or can we find a basic description somewhere else that we can reuse?
• Then we create the digital surrogate, or digitized version, of the object. There are standards that we use to determine what type of digitization equipment to use, and what file type we want to save as.
• Then we create metadata, or a structured description of the object. Metadata includes everything from the title of the object we digitized, to subject terms, to what format we digitized it in, to the actual digital filesize. There are standards that dictate best practices for metadata, too. There are different metadata schema, and some are better for different purposes; for example, some metadata is specific to audiovisual objects, while other metadata is better for 2-dimensional objects. We have to decide how thorough we’re going to be with our metadata; the more thorough we are the easier it will be for users to find the digital objects they want, but the longer it will take us to get the digital objects online. We also need to decide where the metadata itself will be stored.
• Next we need to determine where our preservation storage will be. There are best practices for how many copies of a digital file should be saved and in what sorts of locations--on external hard drives, in the cloud, even on tape in storage facilities like Iron Mountain. 
• Last, we finally make the digitized object available for user access. We have to decide where we’re putting it, and we need to be able to see access statistics to make sure users are able to find our digital objects.

These are all steps we go through when we’re beginning a digitization project at Loyola. We have many different types of collections, so we go through this process whether we’re looking at digitizing books, negatives, videotapes, cassette tapes, reel-to-reel tapes, and film. We also deal with born-digital materials, which we may receive through email, through Google Drive, or on floppy disks, external hard drives, or thumb-drives.

When we digitize 2-dimensional collections in-house, such as books or photos, we use a flatbed scanner or an overhead scanner. We can also do some audiovisual digitization depending on the format. But much of our digitization is outsourced, where we ship our collections to a digitizing facility.

In the next video, we'll learn about some of the digitized collections Loyola has, especially related to the university’s history, and then I’ll talk about how to search them and reuse them. 

Loyola’s Special Collections and Archives preserves materials related to the history of Louisiana and the South, the Society of Jesus, and Loyola University New Orleans. The University Archives detail the activities of the University and the members of its community. They include administrative, academic, student, and community materials ranging from university publications, to Board Minutes, to files from the President’s office, to photos from University Photographers. Many of these collections are restricted, or require permission from the President’s office to access. But some are not, and we have digitized some of these collections to make them easier for you to access.

My colleague Kure Croker is the Special Collections Registrar & Archivist, and she manages receiving and processing new donations to the University Archives. She has made some very useful research guides to our digitized University Archive collections.

The first guide (https://researchguides.loyno.edu/LoyolaUniversityArchives) provides a quick reference to the most frequently used online University Publications and University Archives. These include:

• The Loyola University Bulletins, or course catalogs. These include course descriptions, degree program requirements, lists of faculty, and sometimes also lists of students. This is one of our oldest university collections because it includes bulletins from Jesuits' College and the College of the Immaculate Conception, both predecessors to Loyola University. The earliest bulletin is from Jesuits’ College in 1855. After that, Loyola College was formed, though it was actually a high school. Loyola University as you know it was founded in 1912. This collection includes university-wide bulletins as well as bulletins published by individual colleges at Loyola, some of which no longer exist, like the College of Pharmacy. The Bulletins are helpful if you want to trace the history of a program or curriculum; find out when a particular faculty or staff member worked here; and see what courses were offered at a point in time at Loyola.
• We have also digitized the Maroon Newspaper from 1923 through 2012. The Maroon covers student life, campus activities, cultural and athletic events, Loyola University New Orleans administration, faculty and staff, and other features. It is an incredibly rich resource, especially for finding out how students reacted to local, national, and international events here at Loyola.
• The Wolf is Loyola’s yearbook. It was published from 1924 to 2007, though there were some years, especially in the 1930s and 1970s, where the university did not publish a yearbook. Yearbooks are good for seeing pictures of student events and organizations, and finding out who went to Loyola and who taught here at a given time. 
• The digitized University Athletics collection includes basketball films, programs, and media guides, especially from the 1960s. There are many more materials in the University Archives collection that have not been digitized yet, but this is a slice of what’s available. This collection is notable for its film of 1960s Loyola basketball games.
• The University Photographs collection contains over 10,000 digitized images from Loyola’s official and unofficial university photographers. Everything from commencement to music performances to football games (yes, Loyola used to have a football team!) to homecoming dances to visits from dignitaries is included in this collection. The photos in the collection are often minimally described due to the information available in the archives, so finding images of specific people or events can be tricky sometimes. This collection spans the years 1900 through the early 1990s, but the bulk of images are from the 1940s-1970s.

The other University Archives Research Guide (https://researchguides.loyno.edu/universitypublications) covers publications issued by Loyola University New Orleans from the 1850s to the present. Of interest to you is the tab for Digitized Legacy Publications. This again includes the Bulletins, Wolf Yearbook, and the Maroon, but there are a few other publications linked here. These include
The library newsletter, which was published from 1983-2001 and documents the history of libraries and library staff at Loyola.
There is also the Electronic Theses Collection, which includes Honors theses and some master’s theses written by Loyola students.

In the next two videos, I’ll talk about how to search the digitized university collections, how to save media you might want to include in presentations, and how to find citation and copyright information. 

All of our digitized University Archives, with the exception of the Wolf and the Bulletins, are in the Louisiana Digital Library. I’ll discuss searching the Wolf and the Bulletins in the next video. 

The Louisiana Digital Library, or LDL, is our statewide digital repository. Members include LSU, Tulane, The Historic New Orleans Collection, the State Library, and many other universities, museums, and regional archives. The Research Guides I discussed in the previous video include links to individual collections within the LDL, but there are a few ways you can access our collections there.

Using the main search box on the LDL searches all collections in the LDL, from all institutions. You can also navigate just to Loyola’s collections by scrolling down on the homepage and selecting Loyola. From here, you can search all of Loyola’s LDL collections at once. Or, you can continue narrowing down by selecting a specific collection. 

Once you’re in an individual collection, you can either browse through it, or search within it. With a huge collection like the University Photographs, you will probably want to try searching rather than browsing. In image-based collections, you are just searching the information we’ve provided in the metadata, so you are reliant on whatever terms and keywords we used. For bigger collections like this, especially image-based collections, I recommend keeping your search terms broad, and then narrowing down once you have your search results. For example, search for “students,” and then use the years and subject terms on the left to narrow your search down (example: search “students,” select “Greek Life” from Subject, and specify date range 1950-1960).

Collections like the Maroon are text-based: when you search, you are searching the full text of every issue of the Maroon for almost 100 years, so you can be much more specific in your search. If you search for an assortment of keywords, like Cuban and missile and crisis, those words can appear anywhere in the issue, not necessarily together. I suggest using quotation marks to search for phrases like “Cuban missile crisis;” that will ensure that your results always include the full phrase together. Once you’ve located a result you’re interested in, click on the item, then select “View.” You should be able to see a marker for which page your results are on, and they should be highlighted on the page (example: search “Cuban missile crisis,” select The Maroon Vol. 39 No. 10). 

You can also browse the Maroon by date. Go back to the landing page for the Maroon, and select the “Maroon Newspaper” icon. From there you can browse by year, and then by month and day.

Once you have found a digital object that you want to continue working with, you have a few options. I suggest that you bookmark it in your browser so you can easily find it again. Images, like the University Photographs, have a Download button at the top that you can use to download the image, but again, I recommend bookmarking the page too so you can access the metadata. The metadata displays if you click the “Details” button. The “Details” include copyright information. If an item is under copyright, you can display it and use it in your coursework, but you would need permission from the archives if you wanted to publish it in a book, or make and sell t-shirts with the image on them, for example. 

For text-based collections like the Maroon, you can navigate to the page you want to save and then use your browser’s “save image” function to save as a jpeg. There is also a button labeled “Browse pages as images” located under the digital object; click this, select the page you want, and again use your browser’s “save image” function to save as a png. Sometimes the image quality is not very good when downloading from the LDL; feel free to contact me and I can share the original high-quality scan with you if needed. The metadata for the Maroon, as well as for all other collections, also displays by clicking the “Details” button.

In the next video, I’ll talk about how to search and browse the Wolf and the Bulletins.

While most of our digital collections are in the Louisiana Digital Library, funding to digitize the Wolf Yearbooks and the Bulletins came from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for the LYRASIS Mass Digitization Collaborative, so these items reside in the Internet Archive’s American Libraries Collection. You can get to these collections from the University Archives Research Guide (https://researchguides.loyno.edu/LoyolaUniversityArchives), the University Publications Research Guide (https://researchguides.loyno.edu/universitypublications), or by searching the library website at library.loyno.edu for “Wolf Yearbooks” or “bulletins.” These links will take you to a landing page where you can browse the bulletins or Wolf by year. You can use the options on the left to filter your search. 

Once you’ve identified a volume you want to explore, click on it and use the Book Viewer to navigate through it. You can also search within an individual volume using the search box (example: search 1963 Wolf Yearbook for “protests”). Just like with the Maroon, a marker will appear showing which page your search term or terms are on, and the term should be highlighted on the page. You can save an individual page by using your browser’s “save image” options.” Or, below the Book Viewer, view the many download options available, including downloading the entire book as a PDF. Again, I recommend bookmarking sources you want to return to.

You can browse the Wolf and Bulletins by year, and you can search within individual volumes of both publications. But what if you want to search all of them at once, or search all of the Wolf Yearbooks at once, for a term or name? The Internet Archive’s search function makes this tricky. Luckily, there is a workaround to do this. To search the full text of multiple items at once you’ll need to use your internet browser. In Google, search for “site:archive.org,” which is the URL for the Internet Archive, followed by any search terms you want. For example, to search all issues of the Wolf Yearbook for protests, I would put the following in Google:

site:archive.org Loyola Wolf Yearbook protests

The search results I get back are of the OCR’d text from the yearbook. OCR is an automated process to create full text transcriptions of digitized text, and it’s often very messy. But from here, you can click on the item title to see it in the book viewer, and try your search term again (example, search “protest”) to find it on the page. 

To search across all of the bulletins, try the following in Google:

site:archive.org Loyola New Orleans bulletins [search term]

There is one more thing I want to show you in the Internet Archive. The Internet Archive has a tool called the Wayback Machine that lets you view websites at different points in time. If you’re interested in what information was available on Loyola’s website surrounding different historical events, this is a great place to look.

You can get to the Wayback Machine from the Internet Archive’s homepage at archive.org. Here, plug in the URL for the website you’re interested in; for example, use loyno.edu for Loyola’s website. From the results, you can see all of the years and months where the Wayback Machine captured Loyola’s website. Navigate to a month and day to see what the website looked like at that point in time. For example, by navigating to August 2005, you can see what was on the website before Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and after (example: browse to August 27 2005, August 28 2005, and September 9 2005). Note that the calendar view maps the number of times a website was crawled by the Wayback Machine, not how many times the site was actually updated. Loyola’s website goes back to 1997, so obviously this tool only works for events that happened since then. But the web captures are fully navigable, so you can browse through the entire website on a given day and time. 

To cite digital objects that you are using in a paper or presentation, it’s important to include as much information as you can to help someone else find the object again. In the Louisiana Digital Library, you can find the information you need for citation by clicking the “Details” button. In the Internet Archive, the item description appears below the Book Viewer.

A good example of an MLA citation for a Loyola item from the Louisiana Digital Library is to include the creator of the object, the title of the object, the year of creation, the name of the collection, Loyola’s name, the Name of the website, aka the Louisiana Digital Library, and the URL for the object followed by the date you accessed it. So an example of a citation for one of the University Photographs might be:

Cresson, Russell G. UP009412. 1958. Loyola University New Orleans Photographs Collection, Loyola University New Orleans. Louisiana Digital Library. https://louisianadigitallibrary.org/islandora/object/loyno-p16313coll28%3A14817. Accessed August 11 2020.

I hope these resources help you find archival materials related to times of crisis or change at Loyola. Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any questions about finding digital archival materials online. You can reach me at alau@loyno.edu, or schedule an appointment with me if that would be helpful.