About This Collection

Contents

The Shared History Collection is a result of a pilot project to develop staff expertise in digitization technologies and in providing access to digitized materials and to make available to the public a sampling of images of Fayetteville and the University of Arkansas from the Libraries’ Special Collections. Photographs in this first collection include images of the Washington-Willow Historic District, the Fayetteville square, Dickson Street, the train station, and University of Arkansas buildings such as Old Main or Razorback Stadium.

Photographs in the Shared History project were drawn from both the Special Collections Picture Collection and from manuscript collections, including The William S. Campbell collection of photograph albums and papers (MC 1427) and the Walter Lemke collection (MS L541). Approximately 250 images were selected reflecting primarily scenes of people (students, alumni, faculty, and staff), buildings, activities, and organizations at the University of Arkansas. The other 250 were selected reflecting primarily scenes of Fayetteville people, buildings (homes, businesses, churches, public buildings, etc.), activities, and organizations.

To facilitate searching and retrieval, metadata for each record was drawn from the photos themselves, from finding aids to manuscript collections, and from shelf-list cards for the Picture Collection and entered into the CONTENTdm system. Searchable fields include: title from photograph, photographer or studio (if known), time period, physical description, content notes, source collection, and call number. Not all fields are present for all images; a future project will enrich the metadata with additional information. Searching Help is available.

The Shared History project was funded by grants from the Happy Hollow Foundation.

Technical Information

The Shared History images were scanned on an Epson Expression Scanner, Model 1640XL, with a 12” X 17” scanning bed, using Epson Twain Pro version 1.75A software.

Images were imported into the CONTENTdm image management software acquisition station at 300 DPI in JPEG format. Images were re-sized for ease of printing and browsing using Adobe Photoshop to approximately 6.5 X 8 inches or 470 X 600 pixels. Image file sizes vary considerably.

Metadata and CONTENTdm indexing fields were selected from Dublin Core and MARC elements.
The CONTENTdm server runs on an IIS platform, currently, a 500 MHz Pentium III Dell Poweredge 2400 with 1 GB RAM, RAID5 array, and 27 GB of storage. A project web page was created, and links were established to the CONTENTdm search engine and browse features.

Credits

Personnel who have participated in various phases of planning and implementation of the project include: Alberta Bailey, Andrea Cantrell, Todd Cantrell, Trish Cody, Michael Dabrishus, Cheryl Conway, Barbara Dean, Judy Ganson, Misha Gardner, Martha Guirl, Mikey King, Arthur Morgan, Janet Parsch, Cheri Pearce, Janell Prater, Ethel Simpson, and Mary Walker. Funding was provided by grants from the Happy Hollow Foundation.

Availability of Images

The Shared History collection was designed as a demonstration project to expand staff expertise in digitization technologies and in providing access to digitized materials. Visitors are welcome to download and use the images in the Shared History collection for personal use, within copyright guidelines. At this time, higher-resolution digital copies or prints are not available for purchase. Order information will be posted here when high resolution digital copies or prints are available for purchase

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