Digital Production and
Integration Program
The Yale Library is seeking gifts of $250,000 or more to go towards the $10 Million needed to fund its Digital Production and Integration Program, which includes an institutional repository for digital materials. This will incorporate digital consulting and production services, while also maintaining a continuous assessment of users’ needs. A critically important element in the program is the technical infrastructure, which must include adequate programming resources, and be able to support a repository that is capable of delivering and storing large amounts of electronic text. The design of the Digital Production and Integration Program will respond to the survey undertaken in Summer 2006 of the needs of all Yale Faculty. Of particular priority are the following programs:
Digitization of the Yale Daily News
The Yale Daily News began publication in 1878 and has the historical distinction of being the Oldest College Daily. It has chronicled the panoply that is Yale; student life, sports, university projects, and Yale’s interaction with the city and the world around it. The backfiles are currently only accessible through a limited number of bound volumes of the print newspaper and through microfilm copies. However the latter is difficult to use and both the Yale Daily News and the University Library agree that creating a digital, web-accessible version of the Yale Daily News backfile would be of great value. We estimate that the entire project would cost $500,000.
World War I Project
The aim of this project is to improve access to World War I documentation at Yale, with a particular focus on non-standard published materials such as posters, postcards, prints, music, maps and pamphlets. We want to start by digitizing 500 posters, 500 pamphlets, and 100 songs including both sheet music and sound recordings, all from the era of the First World War. Some funding from the Mellon Foundation has enabled us to start on this project, but further funding will enable us to go ahead with the numbers quoted above, to provide a rich resource reflecting material that has not previously been available for research.
Digitization of the African Collection
African Studies are a popular part of the Yale curriculum and the library is increasingly involved in helping faculty and students to use the collections for research papers. The African Collection has a phenomenal collection of antiquarian postcards, of primarily anthropological/ethnographical interest. A small sample has already been digitized but the library would like to be able to digitize the entire collection, particularly those taken by Casimir Zagourski. In addition, the library holds a small but important collection of African liberation posters, which could form part of this digitization project.
Digitization of Slides from the Visual Resources Collection
Working together with the Art History, Classics and Art and Architecture faculties, the library plans to build a permanent resource of digitized images, being made from its 300,000 existing slides. Many of the slides have deteriorated and the image quality needs to be restored through digitization. Cost estimates for the digitization process show that we could convert into digital form nearly 26,000 slides on topics ranging from ancient history to Native American, to Renaissance and early modern history for $100,000. Alternatively, all the architectural slides covering periods from the Renaissance to the present day could be digitized for $100,000.
