The most frequently asked question in special collections departments these days is, “Is it available on the web?” This question has led us to reexamine our work and our priorities at the Libraries in order to meet the growing expectation from the scholarly community for electronic means to locate and access archival and special collections materials. The Libraries will play a key role in the development of The Claremont Colleges Digital Library, and a major contribution to this effort will be digitizing some of our special collections, thus providing users with primary resources, a basis for good research. That said, digital projects are a time consuming, expensive, and detail driven endeavor, but the positive feedback we have received from Claremont students and faculty indicate they are well worth the hundreds of hours of staff time and the server space. With the addition of our new Digital Projects Specialist in 2002, the Libraries’ Special Collections have stepped up our efforts to provide online access to primary resources.

How do we choose which items to digitize from our vast special collections? Our primary goal is to support learning, teaching, and research at The Colleges, so we attempt to choose those collections that are used by faculty and students in classes. Several Claremont Colleges’ classes have taken advantage of our two digital collections currently on the web, the San Gabriel Mission Matrimonial Investigations and the Wheeler Scrapbooks, http://libraries.claremont.edu/sc/digital.asp, which document the development of early Claremont and Pomona College. These two collections have been among our most frequently requested materials, are unique and historically significant, and as a result of heavy use and age, are in fragile condition.

The preservation of fragile material is the second most important criterion when choosing collections to digitize. Providing a digitized copy of an 18th century document or a collection of 100 year old photographs is one means of insuring that the originals will be handled only when necessary. Digitization also enables us to put copies on the web, a third criterion for our digital projects: delivering wider and easier access to our special collections by electronic means. Making digital copies of these collections available on the web has resulted in inquiries about these collections from researchers, many outside of Claremont, a great example of the power of the web as an access tool.

In practical terms, we are cognizant of copyright and endeavor to choose collections for digitization that are in public domain in order to provide unrestricted electronic access. We also seek to preserve the historical context for digitized items by taking a collections-based approach to choosing projects to insure that scholars, especially students who may be new to using primary resources for research, understand the relationship between items in the collection. This is one reason we digitized whole pages of the Wheeler Scrapbooks rather than only individual items.

We are currently planning for two digital projects in the coming year, chosen using the criteria described above: selected items from the Carruthers Aviation Collection on the history of flight and the William Woods Averell Civil War documents collection. As we move forward with our digitization initiatives, faculty input is essential, and we welcome your comments and ideas for future digitization projects from our special collections that would benefit students and scholars. Please contact Special Collections at (909) 607-3977 or spcoll@libraries.claremont.edu.

Carrie Marsh
Honnold/Mudd Library
carrie.marsh@libraries.claremont.edu