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Developing Digital Collections

Your campus Digital Collections Center is constantly growing its collections base, both in subject and format.  By expanding our digital collections mission, we’re serving more of the diverse and inclusive Purchase campus community, and becoming a larger part of the college’s informational fabric.

The Digital Collections Center (DCC) at Purchase College continues to grow! Primarily, we’ve expanded the kind of collections we digitize and archive, and we’ve increased digital production with the ongoing student employment and internship initiatives we run all year. In addition to our standard services of digitizing and cataloging art history visuals and the library’s archive of senior projects and graduate theses, we are cataloging, publishing, and preserving oral histories (for the Latin American Studies department) and videoed lectures (for the Art and Design department). By expanding the mission further, we’re serving more of the Purchase campus community, and becoming a larger part of the college’s informational fabric.

Every fall and spring, the DCC offers a Digital Humanities internship. This fall, for the first time, we have enough data on newly digitized senior projects that we’re able to analyze trends and produce infographics to share with the campus. We hope that by analyzing our archives through the DH lens, we can provide a greater understanding of what students on campus produce, as well as how important an active archiving program is to contextualizing community scholarship. For more information, please visit our Student Opportunities page. 

Every summer, the DCC collaborates with faculty librarians to run an Archives internship. Like the DH internship, this course is an intense 4 credit fieldwork opportunity that runs the student through an archival and special collections gamut. They learn professional standards and they produce finding aids, inventories, collection condition analysis, and web content for our college website and library social media outlets. For more information, please visit our Student Opportunities page. 

The Digital Collections Center at Purchase College Library is actively supported by both staff and administration, which allows operations to grow and succeed. If you have any questions, want to chat about methodology, or collaborate on future projects, please get in touch. The curator would love that: megan.oliver@purchase.edu.