University Libraries' Digital Collections Hosts Second Annual Digi Day

News item published on: 2015-06-24 09:28:14

Students from the School of Library and Information Science (SLIS) at The University of Southern Mississippi recently participated in the second annual Digi Day workshop, an opportunity for students in SLIS to obtain service hours and digitization experience while assisting the digital lab with existing projects. Students received hands-on experience with common digitization practices including scanning, metadata creation, checksum generation, and basic Optical Character Recognition.

Workshop participants had the opportunity to work with the H. A. and Margret Rey papers, which are part of the de Grummond Children’s Literature Collection. The Reys, known for their creation of Curious George, are among the earliest contributors to the de Grummond Collection. The Rey papers are historic and valuable pieces of the University Libraries’ Special Collections, and their use in this project covered interests in both archival and special collections material, as well as children’s literature.

Students travelled from across the state to take part in the workshop and the lunch and learn, sponsored by the Library and Information Science Student Association. The lunch and learn featured candid conversation with guest speakers Nicole Lawrence, from the Mississippi Digital Library, and Josh Cromwell, from the Aquila Digital Community, about the skills and experience needed to work in different type of digital libraries.

The idea for Digi Day arose in 2014 from discussions regarding the students’ need for service hours, and the ongoing digitization projects in the digital collections. Due to the success of the first two Digi Day workshops, plans are in the works for another Digi Day during the fall semester.

The Digital Collections is part the University Libraries’ Special Collections and is located in McCain Library. The purpose of the digital lab is to digitize physical materials housed in McCain Library and Archives in order to increase access to and preserve scholarly content. For more information about Special Collections, visit http://manager.lib.usm.edu/spcol. To view items in Digital Collections, visit http://digilib.usm.edu/