Digital
Brown & White Slated for Reunion Demo
What kinds
of student protests took place at Lehigh during the late
1960s? What were the big campus issues surrounding Lehigh’s
transition to a co-ed institution in the 1970s? Has the
university ever confronted the practice of local
gaming/gambling in the past and if so, what was its
position?
What kinds
of changes in the curriculum and campus life occurred during
World War I? Did my grandfather, class of ’65, play in the
Lehigh Lafayette football game of November 1963?
The
answers to these and many more questions will become
available to anyone via the Internet when the Brown and
White digital archive is launched.
The
Archive will be demonstrated in Linderman Library at 11:00
am on Saturday, May 16th during the Reunion/Graduation
weekend.
Subsequently the entire back file of the campus newspaper
dating from Tuesday, January 16, 1894 to the year 2000 will
be viewable via web browsers worldwide. The sample page above, printed from the Archive, is from the July 14,
1948 issue during a year when the Brown and White was
published throughout the summer.
The
digital archive accommodates full text searching by word(s)
or exact phrase(s) that can be further refined by date or
date range. Words appearing in advertisements and photograph
captions will also be included in the searchable text.
Formatted
as pdf files, pages can be easily printed. When it is
launched later in the summer, the Brown and White
will be accessible from the Special Collections/Collections
pages at
http://www.lehigh.edu/library/speccoll/collections.html
and from the LTS web page for Digital Library Projects at
http://digital.lib.lehigh.edu/.
The
purpose of creating this digital resource extends beyond
helping alumni reminisce, although its creators hope many
will enjoy this aspect. It will provide a rich site for
students and faculty to use in conducting research on
questions like those posed in the first paragraph.
The
Brown and White will become a very useful primary source
document for a variety of important topics as well as local
history and campus history. Archives and Special Collections
Librarian Ilhan Citak noted that: “Since January 1894 The
Brown and White has been reporting on campus events,
athletics, student life, and significant administrative and
academic decisions as well as documenting news and events
throughout the Lehigh Valley that, in many cases, might not
have been recorded otherwise.”
For
instance, recently Lehigh archeology instructor Benjamin
Carter made use of the prototype Brown and White to document
the location of the Palmer House on the Lehigh campus, an
early residence that may predate Moravian Bethlehem as well
as Lehigh University.
Digitizing
newspapers presents unusual challenges. The paper itself may
be very fragile and not in the best condition. Scanning and
optical character recognition software have difficulty
identifying columns of text as belonging to a particular
article. Hence special software is required to create a
product that allows users to select and view an entire
article even if it is continued on other pages, something
well beyond mounting a series of PDF files sorted by date.
The Lehigh
project is the first one using CONTENTdm
software, by OCLC Inc., to offer newspaper article
segmentation.
LTS students, faculty, and staff have been involved in this
production as well as nationally recognized digitization
experts based in Bethlehem and offshore contractors. Watch
the Lehigh and Library main pages for further announcements
about The Brown and White Digital Archive.
--Susan A. Cady
LTS Director for Administrative and Planning Services
Article posted April 14,
2009
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