Dalhousie University Archives announces Elisabeth Mann Borgese digital archives
Creighton Barrett
I'm sharing this announcement here because it might be of interest to AtoM users:
The Dalhousie University Archives is pleased to announce the availability of a major new digital archival resource. A significant portion of the personal archives of Elisabeth Mann Borgese have been digitized and made available online via the Elisabeth Mann Borgese finding aid: http://findingaids.library.dal.ca/elisabeth-mann-borgese-fonds
The collection documents Mann Borgese’s significant contributions to international oceans policy, her teaching and research activities, and her personal life. Digitized materials include the administrative records of the International Centre for Ocean Development and the International Ocean Institute, publications and speeches, and personal records. The collection is a particularly good source for the study of the diplomatic negotiations that produced the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.
Over 2,00 folders of archival textual records and photographs have been scanned to date. This digitization work produced over 120,000 high-quality TIFF files, more than 11 TB of data. The TIFF files for each folder of textual records were compressed and compiled into PDFs using a custom server script developed by the Dalhousie Libraries’ IT services office. The text of each PDF was then recognized using ABBYY FineReader optical character recognition software. The PDFs have been embedded in the finding aid, which has been created using national and international standards for archival description. The result is a rich body of fully-searchable digital archival material that can be searched or browsed through the Dalhousie University Archives catalogue from anywhere in the world.
The finding aid is published online using the open-source Access to Memory application developed by Artefactual Systems. PDFs will continue to be uploaded through mid-July. The Archives is in the process of digitizing a number of sound recordings and moving images that will be included with the online finding aid and/or uploaded to the University Archives’ YouTube channel.
The project team includes Project Manager John Yolkowski, former Digitization Specialist Krista Jamieson, current Digitization Specialist Kevin Hartford, and Student Assistant Jocelyn Wedel. You can read more about Mann Borgese and the digitization project on the Dalhousie Libraries’ blog: https://blogs.dal.ca/libraries/2015/05/learn-more-about-a-key-figure-in-ocean-studies-check-out-the-elisabeth-mann-borgese-finding-aid/.
This collection has attracted international researchers to Halifax, Nova Scotia and we are now pleased to provide online access to this material for local and distance researchers. This is the first archives digitization project of this scale to be completed at the Dalhousie University Libraries. We are eager to “adopt” this digitization project methodology to other projects and welcome comments and feedback on this new digital resource.
Very best,
Creighton Barrett
Digital Archivist
Dalhousie University Archives
Dan Gillean
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