Many archival photos and documents at Bluffton University are seeing the light of day online via a searchable new website.
Several hundred photos have already been digitized and uploaded to Bluffton University Memory, as have issues of The Witmarsum—the former student newspaper—and examples of World War II-era correspondence. The letters were written by then-current and former Bluffton students serving in various capacities during the war, and by Bluffton administrators.
“It’s a different way to look at the archives collection,” says Carrie Phillips, archives and special collections librarian, about the site (http://bluffton.contentdm.oclc.org/). “It’s providing better access to some of the university’s most interesting historic documents.”
The site’s origins date to exploration of digitization options a few years ago by members of the Ohio Private Academic Libraries consortium, Phillips notes. With the consortium providing needed equipment and a storage and retrieval software platform, she began digitizing old Bluffton yearbooks and issues of The Witmarsum.
The “Wit,” as it was commonly known, was printed for nearly 100 years before it became part of the blufftonconnection.com website in 2010. Issues from 1929-55 are now available on Bluffton University Memory in searchable PDF format, and “I’d like to get the entire ‘Wit’ uploaded,” Phillips says.
Roughly 550 photo images are also on the site, which has been in the works for about a year. Using the ‘60s and ‘70s as the cutoffs for photos for now, she has chosen images that have “historical appeal” and generate the most requests from researchers and others, she explains.
Among the most popular archival photos, she adds, are of prominent people, such as former Bluffton presidents; buildings; and campus scenes, including those that depict, generally speaking, what students were doing at the time.
The idea for adding the World War II correspondence emerged from a Friday faculty coffee conversation about Bluffton students in wartime. “Perry Bush cited a number of these letters in his centennial history of the institution, and they are always a popular resource for history research seminar students,” Phillips recalls. She points out, too, that allowing digital access to the letters and their transcriptions online helps to preserve and protect the original letters from handling damage.
Not only are students using the now-online material, but three of them are helping make it available as well. They are history majors Dana Otto, a senior from Leipsic, Ohio; Amanda Bartel, a junior from Iowa City, Iowa; and Kenny Beeker, a first-year student from McComb, Ohio—all of whom work for Phillips in Bluffton’s Musselman Library.
She says the library could have paid a private company to do the digitization, but instead, students with interest in the subject matter are gaining useful experience “while learning fun facts about Bluffton’s history at the same time.” That approach has also kept control of the project in the hands of those closest to it, she adds.
“It’s been a neat project that has involved everybody on my team, and they all seem to enjoy working on it.”
