Funded by several rounds of the Student-Faculty Collaborative Research Grant through the Office of Dean of Faculty at Rollins, the Olin Digital Library Project was first launched in the summer of 2003. Under the direction of Associate Professor Wenxian Zhang, Head ofArchives and Special Collections, two undergraduate students, Ryan Hudnall ('04) and Corey Schreck ('05) participated in the first stage of the project in 2003, and contributed to the development of the digital collections of Hamilton Holt, Face of Rollins, and Rollins Architecture and Landscape; in 2004, Corey Schreck and Scott Hansen ('05) documented the Student Lives at Rollins; in 2007, Rachel Todd ('09) and Abigail Thomas ('09) worked together to create two additional collections: Winter Park and Central Florida Community, and Treasures at Rollins Archives. In addition, archival student assistant Hilary Serra ('08) also made contributions to the digital archive project.

The project team wishes to express great appreciation to Dr. Thomas Moore, Coordinator of the Summer Student-Faculty Research Project, and the Office of the Dean of Faculty for their strong financial supports; to Library Directors Jonathan Miller and Donna Cohen for their administrative supports; to Professor Edna McClellan for her guidance in defining and reviewing OCLC metadata; to Ms. Miriam Moore of Information Technology for her technical support; and to Professor William Svitavsky for his assistance in the design and maintenance of the database web page.

The following paragraphs define the goals, procedures and workflow of the project:

The Project Goals

In support of the department’s mission of acquiring, preserving and providing access to collections of special value to Rollins College and the greater Florida community, the goals of the Olin Digital Library Project are:

• to increase community awareness of unique historical materials held at Olin;

• to broaden users’ access to selected collections;

• to promote the use of primary sources and provide a stimulating, innovative environment for historical research;

• to provide an alternative format of storage and preserve the most valuable and frequently used collections.

The likely users of the project will be students, faculty, scholars, and the general public who are interested in the history of the college and nearby community.

Areas of Focus

Photographic Collection - a visual documentation of Rollins College, Winter Park, and Central Florida from the late 1880s.

Textual Records - historical documents of the college, writings/speeches of its presidents, letters of prominent figures, manuscripts of important scholars, and other unique items in the collections.

The selection will be based primarily on subject category, regional geography, historical period and type of materials. Possible themes include: history of Rollins and Winter Park, college architecture and landscape, famous alumni, treasures at Olin, etc.

Desirable Outcome

• Network-based display of digitized collections with browsing, keyword, and field search capabilities using OCLC ContentDM

• Uncompressed electronic master back-up files in TIFF format on CD.

• Special web page dedicated to Hamilton Holt and the history of the college

• Online bibliography of Holt’s writings & speeches on internationalism and liberal art education

Project Procedures

• Organize the project team with assigned responsibilities

• Search, survey and evaluate the value of the collection; assess the physical condition of the materials and the suitability for digitization

• Document preparation, fill the metadata form, copyright clearance if necessary

• Image capture and conversion: scanning source materials to create digital masters (TIFF on CD) and derivatives for screen or print (JPEG & TXT) using Adobe Photoshop & OmniPage

• Resource description: cataloging metadata into OCLC ContentDM, organize information using systematic schemes and predetermined criteria

• Image loading, storage, navigation and retrieval

Project Workflow

• Scan images at 300 dpi using UMAX flat-bed scanner, save in TIFF files according to file naming procedures; run OCR (Optical Character Recognition) for textual documents; when an entire volume (650 MB) is reached, burn into a CD

• Create JPEG files using Adobe Photoshop, modify images if needed (rotating, cropping, etc.), save in a different folder under H (Archival Web)

• Create TXT files for textual documents using OmniPage and save in under H (Archival Text)

• Import image files into ContentDM

• Enter image descriptions, complete the required Dublin Core metadata elements

• Verify and upload images