I'm pleased to announce the Tufts eScholarship collections in the Tufts Digital Library. The eScholarship collections showcase the Open Access publications and presentations of Tufts faculty and staff. It's a small set of papers right now, but growing rapidly.

DCA is proud of eScholarship's flagship collections, including many of the papers of Tufts philosopher Daniel Dennett and some of the research output of the Perseus Project. We are grateful to Professor Dennett and to the Perseus Project for partnering with us as we work to get Tufts' institutional repository launched.

The eScholarship collections, for the time being, contain faculty and staff scholarship. The Tufts Digital Library also contains plenty of student scholarship, including Master's theses from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, oral histories from the West-Medford African-American Remembrance and the Lost Theaters of Somerville projects, and student research projects from the anthropology class "Urban Borderlands".

Over the next several months, you will see many new papers come into the eScholarship collections, as well as improvements in the user interface. Have ideas about what might make these collections easier to use? Leave us a comment right here with your suggestions!

The website featured 7 images from our diverse collections. Titles are below each image. Click on the image for an expanded view and more information.

View of campus from The Rez, circa 1900

Looking eastward from the Tufts Golf Course at the Chemical Laboratory and Jackson Gymnasium, circa 1930

Jackson students horseback riding, 1961

McIlroy Fluid Network Analyzer analog computer, 1958

"It takes brains to learn about brains"

Students at work in Ginn Library, 1958

Registration for classes, circa 1965

Accessioning (or gathering) Electronic Records may not seem all that exciting to you. But for us at the DCA it is at the very core of our tasks here at Tufts. It's not as easy to gather electronic records as you might think. At least not if you are going to do it right. To help us out we have received a grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) to expand our e-records program. For more about TAPER.

Why is it so hard to gather e-records?

In short, it's because we would also like to preserve them and find them again, preferably in the same condition. Many would say that it's easy to save things digitally, especially with the ever decreasing cost of electronic storage. And they would be somewhat right, but mostly wrong.

Sure, you could save as many bits and bytes as you want and continue moving them from server to server. But could you find a specific file? Could you find a file with potentially important information but with a somewhat less informative file name like, "Today's Memo.doc"? And if you did, by chance, find the file, then how would you know if it had the same information on it? How do you know it has not been tampered with in a way the changes the authenticity of the document? With rapid changes in software and hardware, will you be able to look at the photo you took with your phone at your graduation 5, 10, 30 years from now?

These are the kinds of questions we archivists think about and keep us up at night. Luckily, we are trained in describing information (also referred to lovingly as, "The Universe of Knowledge") and making ways to find the information again. It's not easy, but someone has to do it. Because if we didn't try (melodrama alert!) then the cultural heritage of our generation would be lost forever.

So next time you snap a picture with your iphone or decide on a name for your file when you "save as", think of us, the archivists. We're trying our best to save these things and help you find them again.

post by Krista Ferrante

Krista Ferrante is a new archivist at Tufts hired to work on the TAPER project.

October is National Archives Month!

It's a year for special celebration as the National Archives and Records Administration celebrations its 75th anniversary, and the Digital Collections and Archives pushes into its second decade. Here are some images from 1934 and 1999.

(Warning: In linking to and quoting from our collection of books from 19th-century London, this post references terminology and attitudes around people with disabilities which we do not consider acceptable any longer. The words are still there, however. Be warned.)

One of my favorite new blogs is NARAtions the blog of the United States National Archives. One thing I love about this blog is that they ask readers for help answering some of the tough questions we all face. For example, their most recent post asks how to efficiently transcribe NARA's billions of pages of handwritten documents.

I'd like to take a page from their book (but not a handwritten page!) and ask you all for help. We are going to start the process of redesigning the user interface of the Tufts Digital Library to make it more useful and user-friendly for our users. Question: What features do you like to see to help you browse digital collections?

One thing we can do while designing our new website is a focus on the principles of accessibility and universal design. This means not merely testing with adaptive technology and conforming to stable and emerging accessibility standards, but making sure the site provides a rich user experience for all users. Let's not have any more of the attitude we see in another volume of Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor, when he writes of "Of the Crippled Street Bird-Seller".