Category Archives: Digital Special Collections Process

Why Archive?

When we think of archives, we tend to think of collections of documents, photographs, or records which have been permanently preserved for historical or research reasons. Out of the millions of pieces of material we human beings create yearly, only certain items are chosen to represent the value of an age or a group or an organization we wish to preserve. Someone must decide whether a grocery list jotted down on a napkin by a famous person will one day offer insight into that famous person’s life or the times in which he or she lived. This is heady stuff and not taken lightly by archivists....

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Digital Special Collections Process , , , , Updated: January 4, 2016

The Value of Archiving

So, why archive anything? The idea is no longer one of item storage or preserving references to important directions from previous generations on how to accomplish some task or other (although, of course, those things are still important). These days we archive to provide information from our social past to our ever evolving social future. We seek to connect those who have gone before us with those who are yet to come. We seek to provide an answer to questions like, “How did we get from then to now, and where do we go from here?” “How can we work together and build a cooperative future?” “How can studying our past help us effectively create a beneficial future?”...

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Digital Special Collections Process Updated: August 4, 2016

Digital Book Scanning

Ever wonder how a hard cover book gets into digital form for our Special Collections archive? The process is relatively simple, although there are a few steps involved. Some of the books and documents in our collection are rare, and while the library will preserve these to ensure they are available to anyone who is interested, digitizing helps preserve them in a unique way so that we can offer them to an Internet based audience. And this means reaching thousands of people, some of whom may not have access to a library at all.

The process begins with scanning....

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Digital Special Collections Process , , , , Updated: August 14, 2013

ROTC at U of D

In 1963, a lot of colleges and universities (as well as some high schools) were offering Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC). As part of the Morrill Act of 1862, federal land granted to states for the establishment of institutions of higher learning required that military training be provided as part of their curriculum. Protests that took place during the 1960s over the Vietnam War and the violence associated with all wars, however, influenced the decision to drop ROTC from many...

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Digital Special Collections Process, University of Detroit Tower Yearbook Collection , , , , , , , Updated: June 3, 2013

Welcome to the Digital Special Collections blog

The University archives are home to a wealth of information about the history of the University, the metro-Detroit area, the state, even the nation. For more than a decade now, the University Libraries and the Instructional Design Studio have been digitizing collections from the archives and making them available to the world through the Special Collections page on the Re:Search portal. In the future we will be using this space to explore the collections that can be found in our...

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Digital Special Collections Process Updated: January 23, 2013