The Life of a Digital Collections Intern

Posted on behalf of Stephanie Sendaula Before I even applied for my current internship, which is in digital collections, I debated whether or not I should apply for a traditional archive internship … processing, describing, ladder-climbing, etc… To be honest I do a little bit of those now. Actually, I do a lot of ladder [...]

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Improving Access Through Technology

I am happy to announce that the Historical Society of Pennsylvania’s new digital assets management system (DAMS) has officially gone live for the public!   You can access the DAMS by going to digitallibrary.hsp.org The implementation of this system, which is driven by the open source software Collective Access, was a major component of the [...]

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Obsolecence in Vogue

In my last blog post I wrote about HSP’s ongoing wrestling match with its card catalog and the difficulties in converting legacy systems and data.  One thing I failed to mention is the importance of designing any information system with future data migration in mind.  This is of particular importance for an archival institution, like [...]

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More Tiffs, Less Typing

My role in the Digital Center for Americana Project is to scan items and enter metadata for these scans. This includes information on where the item is located in the building, who created it, what it is, and descriptive notes. In addition I enter the technical particulars of the scan itself, such as dpi and [...]

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Metadata

If you go to the section entitled About Us at our website, you’ll see that the Historical Society of Pennsylvania has over 19 million manuscripts and graphic items. HSP was founded in 1824 and as you can imagine, we have been collecting and acquiring materials on a continued basis since. In order to find all [...]

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