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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons™
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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
The Espy Project: From Paper Archives To Digital Scholarship, Mark Wolfe, Melissa Mcmullen, Amanda Partridge
The Espy Project: From Paper Archives To Digital Scholarship, Mark Wolfe, Melissa Mcmullen, Amanda Partridge
University Libraries Faculty Scholarship
The M.E. Grenander Department of Special Collections and Archives has digitized the most complete existing collection of execution records and is making them available for digital scholarship. M. Watt Espy spent his life documenting the death penalty in the United States. He created over 24,000 index cards and over 100,000 pages of reference material to document each case. The project connects this source material to a problematic 1980s-era execution dataset. We implemented Samvera’s open source digital repository software, Hyrax, which provides online access to all of the digitized materials. Hyrax allows users to query digital collections for online viewing or …
The Historical Hazards Of Finding Aids, Gregory Wiedeman
The Historical Hazards Of Finding Aids, Gregory Wiedeman
University Libraries Faculty Scholarship
Archivists have traditionally understood access through finding aids, assuming that—through creating them—they are effectively providing access to archival materials. This article is a history of finding aids in American archival practice that demonstrates how finding aids have negatively colored how archivists have understood access. It shows how finding aids were originally a compromise between resource constraints and the more familiar access that users expected, how a discourse centered on finding aids hindered the standardization of archival description as data, and how the characteristics of finding aids as tools framed and negatively impacted the Encoded Archival Description (EAD) standard. It questions …