Grace Dunklin, Campus Carrier Staff Reporter
The Martha Berry Digital Archive, a collaborative project between Bloomsburg University and Berry College, launched on April 18.
This project, which started in 2010, takes the original physical documents of the Martha Berry Collection from the Berry Collage Archives and digitizes them. The documents are uploaded to a website where they are categorized and described for ease of use.
The Martha Berry Digital Archive was first proposed by Stephanie Schlitz, associate professor of linguistics from Bloomsburg University and Berry College alumna.
“As a linguist I am trained to work with historical documents,” Schlitz said. “When I learned that the Martha Berry Collection was in poor condition and was really inaccessible I was really discouraged. I’m a Berry College alumna and I was astonished that part of the college’s cultural heritage was being lost. Documents in many instances are crumbling on the shelves and unless they are preserved, we lose that history and that college cultural heritage.”
After learning that there were no plans to digitize, Schlitz proposed her own digitization model.
Sherre Harrington, the director of Memorial Library, said the digitization of the documents would aid with research and the preservation of the original collection.
“It makes the materials available to researchers and scholars in a way that the physical collection isn’t and it actually preserves the physical collection because in many cases the digital document is sufficient for the researcher’s purposes,” Harrington said.
Michael O’Malley, Berry archivist and curator of the original Martha Berry Collection, agreed that this digital archive helped with both research and preservation.
“More and more of the correspondence and archival collections are being used often, and we look to this digital archive as a way to get the materials out,” O’Malley said. “It’s difficult for people to get here and look at the materials. So we scan it, put it up on the platform and then people anywhere can access it anytime.”
Harrington said that since O’Malley is the curator of the original collection, the team looks to him to make sure that the project conforms to appropriate archival procedures.
Schlitz said the project conformed to the Digital Library of Georgia standards as well as international preservation and access standards and the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative. More information about these standards can be found on the Martha Berry Digital Archive site.
One of the more prominent details on the site is the presence of individual collections. Some of these collections are directly from the physical archive.
O’Malley said many pieces in the collection are connected.
“Not everything stands alone,” O’Malley said. “One letter can be tied with other letters, photographs, materials within the archives. I am able to research and help identify those connections within MBDA.”
Sophomore Meg Ratliff has been working with the project since her freshman year. She originally worked with editing the document descriptions, but is now involved with scanning original documents and creating collections within the site.
Ratliff said students and people from outside the Berry community are encouraged to help with the editing process.
“There are a lot of documents and with a small group of us it is really hard with other people interacting and editing it themselves we can just go in and check it,” Ratliff said. “It will go by a lot faster than four or five of us trying to do the 13,000 [documents] we have right now.”
“One of the first things to note is that it is about community engagement,” Schlitz said. “It’s designed to encourage community interaction with historical documents. So in many cases individuals don’t have a chance to work with primary source documents. We are making it possible not only for people to look at them but also to describe them.”
Harrington not only encouraged people to edit on the site, but also read through some of the collections as they did so.
“It’s not just a digital archive in the sense that we’ve scanned them all and there they are, but it’s this interactive project that involves the full community in providing access to the collection,” Harrington said.
Senior Kasey Haessler, who has worked with the project since 2010 as a scanner, editor and blogger, said that around 12,000 documents have currently been uploaded to the site, but that there are an estimated 100,000 documents in the entire collection. She said that one of the reasons for inviting the public to help with the editing, in addition to simply get them interested in the material, is the manpower needed to process these documents.
To find out more about the Martha Berry Digital Archive, or to help with the project, visit the project website at http://www.mbda.berry.edu. In addition to information about the collection, its staff and how to help, there is a blog run by students that invites participants to make connections between their personal and academic lives and the documents in the archive. Called “Discovering MBDA,” this blog can be found by clicking the “Learn” tab on the Martha Berry Digital Archive homepage.