OSUIT Archives and Collections

Archival Project Year in Review

Last May, I was hired to reorganize and digitize the archival collections of the OSUIT library. The archive has been through what looks like decades of neglect and the majority of the boxes of materials were in haphazard order when I started. I have spelunked  box after box trying to turn the mess into a coherent order. The digitization project I have started on is going to be absolutely massive as there are what I estimate to be hundreds of thousands of items that have historical value that need digitizing. The platform created for uploading our materials is ContentDM, which can be seen here, https://dc.library.okstate.edu/digital/collection/osuitarchive/search. Our current ContentDM has 188 items as of this writing, but the previous prototype ContentDM I created had 4,078 items. That was because the Stillwater campus has made me aware that if we are to use their system (they host our ContentDM), we need to follow specific rules, rules which usually require a massive amount of labor to follow. Stillwater has the luxury of having a full archival staff, whereas we only have me, who is currently only hired as one-year temporary worker. Currently, we have it set up where Stillwater will upload materials to our ContentDM as soon as they approve the content we send them on their Google Drive. I have accomplished a great deal this year, digitizing thousands of items and tens of thousands of book pages. The bulk of those items include photographs, which I have gotten 4,700 digitized this year. An additional bunch of several thousand more born digital photographs on CD-ROMs have been placed on a hard drive. Book collections in high demand, including the entirety of our yearbook collection from 1948-1991 has been digitized and sent to Stillwater for approval. The entirety of other book collections, such as our student handbooks, course catalogs, desk calendars, telephone directories, graduation programs and self-study reports have also been digitized. Despite how much has been done, there are still tens of thousands of items of historical value left to go. As I mentioned earlier, we had thousands of items, but Stillwater has the following requests for extra steps to happen between digitization and uploading. Before the images are to be uploaded, they must be edited in a specific manner using an image editing program. This takes much longer than the actual scanning, but ensures that the images are as aesthetically-pleasing and readable by text-recognition software as possible. I have completed this process for all of our photographs, as well as the entirety of the yearbook and student handbook collection. We are just waiting on Stillwater to officially approve the items and upload them. There are still thousands of pages of material left to edit despite the thousands of pages already edited. The other extra task Stillwater has asked is adding a great deal of data for our items. Each photograph we have requires a detailed caption before it can be uploaded to ContentDM and creating said caption is also a task that takes longer than the actual scanning. So far, I have gotten 4,400 out of the 4,700 photographs captioned and have added captions for 308 of those photographs that have been collected from our collection of photographs on CD. There are tens of thousands of photographs left to caption.

Another major project I have been working on is the video digitization and organization project. As I mentioned before, when I started this job, all materials were in a random incoherent order. I have organized all tapes and CDs in chronological date order or alphabetical for undated items. One major project involved digitizing every tape that has historic value and that project has been completed (at least with the VHS and SVHS format, digitizing Umatic or DV tapes is not possible with our current set of technology). This was a lengthy project as it takes the entire runtime of a tape plus five minutes in order to digitize it to a DVD. With some tapes lasting as long as five hours, this was a lengthy project. Of the non-Umatic or DV tapes, every tape OSUIT has the copyright to has been uploaded to the new archival Youtube page I created and the biggest accomplishment of this year. The Youtube has 261 videos filled with OSUIT's promotional videos, historic conferences, footage of historical events, and more. Here is the link to the Youtube, Oklahoma State University Okmulgee Archives - YouTube. 

The Youtube also contains a very important project I have worked on, our oral histories project. I have spoken with two former presidents, Dr. Bob Klabenes and Dr. Bill Path as well as former HR Director Judy Henson. We are hoping to get more oral histories done if we can find more retirees volunteering to do them. Here is the link to the oral histories playlist, Oral History with Judy Henson (youtube.com). 

The final project I have been working on is creating a catalog for the archival collections. It can be found on, https://archives.osuit.edu/. We have thousands of items to catalog and, unfortunately, the language used to catalog items on ContentDM, is incompatible with ArchivesSpace, so I have to translate the data. Twelve collections have been cataloged so far, some, such as the photograph collections, containing as much as nine hundred items. The course catalogs and graduation programs are a few examples of items that have been cataloged. We only got access to ArchivesSpace in early December so I have not had as much time to work on it as the rest of these projects and there are hundreds of thousands of items left to catalog, but getting a few thousand items cataloged is a good start for a short amount of time and having the data for ContentDM made it easier to catalog, just requiring translation to its metadata language.

Anyway, these are my accomplishments and I hope that the end goal of getting the entire collection digitized and placed on ContentDM as well as cataloged on ArchivesSpace excites you and I hope the strides I have made had impressed you. It is going to be a long journey to complete these projects, especially following Stillwater's protocols.