Bowman Library has joined JSTOR's new Open Community Collections service. The service provides a trusted access repository for digital special collections held by libraries.  Menlo College is one of 16 SCELC Member institutions that is participating in the JSTOR pilot to form a Shared Collections Digital Cooperative. We hope to preserve the College's history for future generations by digitizing archival content and providing access to the digital copies through JSTOR while also stabilizing the physical copies in the archive. 
 
We anticipate that demand for digitization and reproduction of content in our archives will grow as our college approaches its 100th anniversary. By digitizing in advance, we aim to provide access while reducing demand on the brittle, at-risk physical content in the archives.
 
In addition to saving our library money, we are participating in the JSTOR Open Community Collections to contribute to an effort that will lead to consortial services built around multiple institution's special collections. The pilot is currently focused on establishing the technical infrastructure and staff expertise, including:
  • Platform development for a consortial collection
  • Collection creation, migration and loading processes
  • Harvesting services
  • Metadata standardization and services
  • Community building amongst library, consortium and JSTOR staff
  • Creating a pipeline of development priorities
Next year, Bowman Library hopes to additionally participate in Portico, which is the back-end service to the Open Community Collections services, and it provides long-term, dark archiving and digital preservation services. This service will stabilize the digital copies of our archives to ensure their persistence over time. 
 
Why is it important to digitize Menlo's historical documents and preserve them in international library infrastructure? 
  • Menlo College's historical archives are at serious risk of loss, deterioration and damage. They contain the artifacts that document our College's history, including newspapers, brochures, photographs and more. 
  • Managing digital archives is not just a matter of scanning and saving digital copies on a college server. By participating in industry-standard digital archives solutions such as this one, provided by JSTOR, we are able to fully engage in all of the services required to successfully manage digitized archival content alongside the physical archives. We aim to preserve the institution's history and make it accessible to future generations. 
  • By making archival content more accessible in bespoke international library infrastructure, new primary source material may come to light that faculty, students and others might use in their research. 
Support the digitization project
If you would like to support digitization of Menlo College's Archives, please contribute via our giving site. Add "library digital technologies/archives" in the comments for your donation.