VIVA Special Collections Committee
Minutes

Present: Ned Berkeley (UVA), Kay Domine (W&M), Eric Ackerman [for Gail McMillan] (VPI&SU), Betsy Pittman (VCU), Paul Koda (GMU), Joyce Ogburn (ODU), Nancy Marshall (Steering Committee), and John Kneebone (LVA).

The Dear Colleague letter was reviewed and signed by the institutional representatives (Eric signed for Gail) and will go out in August. The letter requests input from history faculty for future digitization projects.

John announced that the Virginia Social Studies Educators will meet in Richmond (at the Marriott Hotel) on 11-12 October. SCC is welcome to some space in the exhibit the LVA is mounting. Betsy will discuss this further with John.

Nancy announced that SCHEV has verified that the $20,000 allocation per institution ($100,000 per year of the biennium) for Special Collections digitization has been sent to the institutions and not to the main VIVA account. It has been recommended that each member of the committee begin the search for the funds at their home institution. [Subsequent Steering Committee meeting has allocated $20,000 for ODU from main VIVA budget.]

The committee confirmed that the direction for the 1996-1997 year, in addition to continuation of digitization of guides as appropriate, will be a regional approach to the digitization of full text materials. Each institution has materials that are significant for their region and as such contribute to the diversity of the Commonwealth. Projects proposed will reflect the more unusual aspects of institutional collections and can include manuscript materials, reports, photographs, correspondence, etc. In recognition of the limited staffing in all represented repositories, collections that are being digitized as a result of non-VIVA endeavors should also be considered to contributing to the regional perspective of VIVA Special Collections regardless of funding source. The descriptive web page for this section will be drafted by the committee and specific links provided to the appropriate sections of institutional web pages.

A brief description of insitution project proposals follows:

George Mason University

Special Collections & Archives at George Mason University plans to develop the following two digitized collections as part of its contribution to VIVA's effort to digitize special collection's materials. Each collection contributes to the resources availableto and by the Northern Virginia region, where George Mason University is located, to the Commonwealth of Virginia, and to the greater research needs of the United States and the world.

• Virginia Civil War Images from HARPER'S WEEKLY

  HARPER'S WEEKLY was an extremely popular publication during the Civil War. Much of its popularity was due to the hundreds of wood engravings it published to depict in detail every aspect of the events and participants of the War. The wood engravings were created by some of the foremost artists of the day. Special Collections & Archives plans to survey the publication from 1860 to 1865 to identify and produce a finding aid/reference guide to the Virginia related Civil War images. (It is expected that there will be approximately 500 Virginia images.) A large selection of images will be selected and scanned for access through VIVA. The information will be useful for a wide range of persons, including historians, teachers, citizens of Virginia, Civil War "buffs," high school and college students, archivists, etc.

• Planned Community Archives

  A Planned Community integrates every aspect of human life, including the following: social activities, education, health services, recreation, religious institutions, industrial facilities, and commercial centers. Planned Communities (often called "New Towns" or "Greenbelt Towns") began to be designed and constructed in Great Britain at the end of the nineteenth century. The movement rapidly spread to the United States where various Planned Communities were started. But it was not until the 1960s that the first major Planned Community was constructed and hailed a success. It is Reston, Virginia, and it draws planners from around the country and world to see "how it was done." The Planned Community Archives contain hundreds of thousands of documents on Reston (and other Planned Communities), including deeds, certificates, promotional brochures, reports, photographs, correspondence, maps, etc. Through judicious selection and scanning, Special Collections & Archives will identify core documents that will be scanned and made electronically available through VIVA so that planners, architects, developers, business leaders, landscape designers, environmentalists, transportation experts, etc., may access the information to plan their own communities and cities.

  Old Dominion University

  ODU Library will contribute to the VIVA Special Collections digitizing projects in the areas of Civil War material and local history. We will investigate whether we need additional equipment or staffing.

  • The collections we will explore for the Civil War include:

    The papers of Edward F. Hewins, which relate primarily to the his father, a Union soldier who settled in Hampton; and the papers of Admiral John Randolph Tucker, commander of the Confederate States Navy.

  • We will focus on Norfolk desegregation for the local history contribution. The collections of papers include:

    Archie Boswell, attorney for defendents in two cases to reopen Norfolk schools to avoid integration; Paul T. Schweitzer, Norfolk school board from 1952-1960 and City Council 1960-1968; A.E.S. Stephens, unsuccessful candidate for governor; Dr. Forrest P. White, central role in formation of Norfolk Committee for Public Schools; and Margaret White, Norfolk teacher profiled in CBS documentary "The Lost Class of `59."

  University of Virginia

  UVA Special Collections will continue with its work on making available online the Calendar of its Jefferson Papers, and images of the documents themselves. We will add some selected Civil War material, probably soldiers'(Union and Confederate) letters describing scenes and events in Virginia. Other department projects will bring online: images taken from the glass-plate negatives of the Holsinger Studio Collection, which centers on Charlottesville and Albemarle County in the period 1890-1920; images and electronic texts from 500 basic works of American Literature; and at least 500 HTML-tagged finding aids for the latest Berkeley finding aids grants project.

  Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

  Special Collections in conjunction with the Scholarly Communications Project at Virginia Tech's University Libraries will use the support from VIVA to fund digitizing and Web access. We will digitizing images for archival preservation but initially present thumbnail images linked to our Internet-accessible finding aids. We will also enter the identifying text and build a searchable imagebase (image database).

  • Our first choice is to provide access and to digitize images from our railroad archives. VT has the records of the Norfolk and Western Railway Company, the Southern Railway Company, and their predecessor companies, with documentation for over 300 railroads in the south and midwest from the 1830s to the 1930s. The railroad photograph collection includes over 30,000 images of locomotives, towns and cities the railroads passed through, train stations, and individuals associated with various railroad. Primarily a line carrying agricultural products at its inception, the N&W rapidly became associated with the mineral development of the southwestern part of Virginia and West Virginia. It went on to acquire franchises which ran to the coalfields to the west, to Lynchburg, Va. and Durham, North Carolina.

  • Our second choice is to use the support from VIVA to fund digitizing and Web access to images from our Civil War collections. These finding aids are also available on the Internet and links to the original source materials would greatly enhance the appeal of the collections to the Commonwealth. Materials to be digitized include soldier's letters, diaries, daybooks, and business records, as well as war post-war reminiscences, slides and photographs of Civil War sites, and audio tapes of Civil War Roundtable lectures.

  Virginia Commonwealth University

  Digitization of reports of the Richmond First Club, a local civic group.

  The Club studies several issues of regional significance (education, transportation, utilities) every year and issues a report to the community. Permission has been obtained to publish the reports and link appropriately to the Web version of the guide. Selected portions of the Virginia Black History Archives (electronic full text database of manuscripts from the Richmond metro African American community) will also be made available as part of VCU's contribution.

  College of William and Mary

  The three projects the Special Collections Division of the Earl Gregg Swem library will be working on as part of the VIVA initiative are a Guide to Civil War Research at the Earl Gregg Swem Library, an inventory of the papers of the Jamestown Corporation, and materials from the University Archives pertaining to the admission of women in 1918.

  • CIVIL WAR

    The Guide to Civil War Research at the Earl Gregg Swem Library focuses on listing collections and newspapers from Swem Library's Manuscripts and Rare Books Department and on material from the University Archives which details the closing of the college and the destruction by fire of the Wren Building. It also includes a listing of the library's microfilm collections covering the wartime period as well as a select bibliography of stacks books on the war. Selected images of original documents and photographs from the collections will be included.

  • REGIONAL

    The papers of the Jamestown Corporation, which produced Paul Green's The Common Glory, cover the period 1946-1979 and include programs, scripts, photographs, publicity material, sheet music, and business records for the outdoor drama. The collection also includes similar materials for The Founders, a shorter lived Green play. Two famous actors, Linda Lavin and Goldie Hawn, appeared in The Founders and The Common Glory. Selected images of the original documents and photographs from the collection will be available on-line also.

    The College of William and Mary was the first state college in Virginia to admit women. Present day students like to write papers on the co-education process, and the library will be putting up images and full text of some primary materials relating to those early days, including the diary of a female member of the first coed class.

  Library of Virginia

  LVA's "digital collections" reflect the LVA's mission to serve the library and archival needs of the government and citizens of Virginia. As such, few of them have a specific regional focus, although by providing access to statewide resources, the LVA's digital collections will certainly complement a regional-resource project.

  Of the LVA's digital collections, the U.S. Army Signal Corps Photograph Collection (SCC) best fits the project's regional focus. The SCC includes more than 3,500 photographs from the Hampton Roads Embarkation Series, 1942-1946. These photographs show the preparation and loading of war materials, the activities of the U.S. Quartermaster Corps, U.S. military personnel arriving and departing through the ports of Hampton Roads, civilian employees, Red Cross workers, visiting entertainers, etc.

  The electronic index to the collection provides keyword search access to the descriptive text associated with each photograph. Personal names, ship names, geographical locations, and many other terms may be searched, and the descriptive texts that accompany each photograph can be retrieved. The SCC database also links the digitized images of the photographs to the entries retrieved upon searching.

Discussion of the Civil War as a subject page was introduced. It was agreed that the overriding/unifiying theme of regional could easily onclude several subgroups or sections, one of which could be the Civil War.

Betsy asked if others on the committee had heard anything about the status of the beta version of the Berkeley DTD. Nothing recent has been announced.

Nancy requested opinions on a vendor announcement that had been sent to W&M.

John announced the LVA decision in regard to the Monticello (Solinet web) project. With the shift in focus to business and economics, the project has lost appeal for most members of the committee.

The next meeting of the SCC will be held in September at ODU. Exact date to be determined soon.

Respectfully submitted,
Betsy Pittman, Chair