201 MTSU LIBRARY PREPARES TO SING “THANKS FOR THE MEMORIES”

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Nov. 28, 2007
EDITORIAL CONTACT: Gina Logue, 615-898-5081

MTSU LIBRARY PREPARES TO SING “THANKS FOR THE MEMORIES”
Contributions Sought for Accessible Digital Archive of University Heritage

(MURFREESBORO) – Officials at the James E. Walker Library at MTSU are embarking on a program to convert the heirlooms of the university’s storied past into accessible digital images in preparation for the school’s centennial in 2011 and beyond.
The librarians and students who will work on the MTSU Memory Project seek to collect photographs, correspondence, memorabilia and other items from the campus community and the community at large.
“I think our first priority will be the lower-hanging fruit, the photographs, documents,” Ken Middleton, associate professor at the Walker Library, says. “But I’m hoping as the centennial comes closer that we can include some audio from oral history interviews, for instance, and I’m hoping that some video, some old home movies, will come up from private collections.”
Key categories of special interest to the archivists include the founding of the institution, World War I, women’s suffrage, the Great Depression and the New Deal era, World War II and the G.I. Bill, the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War and women’s issues, including Title IX, the June Anderson Women’s Center and the Women’s Studies Program.
The Memory Project is an outgrowth of the statewide Volunteer Voices Project, a consortial endeavor supported by a $1.8 million grant from the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services. With a $5,000 allocation from the MTSU Foundation, project managers will pay a graduate assistant to be a liaison to the campus for the solicitation of materials.
“We are devoting a small percentage of each of four librarians’ time to the project, … and we will also be diverting a little bit of student worker funds to have some additional student help,” says Mayo Taylor, Team Leader for Access Services at the library.
The point person on all things cyberspace will be Fagdéba Bakoyéma, whose experience setting up digital libraries in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania and work as a digital imaging specialist with the Indiana University Digital Library Program will serve the project well.
“I will be working with everybody, helping make decisions on what to select, especially the technical aspect of it, which is determining specifications of images and digital objects and how to have them displayed correctly,” Bakoyéma says. Using ContentDM software, Bakoyéma will establish a Web site that will be accessible to anyone with an Internet connection. A searchable data base geared toward key words will put users in touch with images of the artifacts they seek.
Taylor notes that ContentDM allows copyright status to be set item-by-item, and that each contributor of materials will be able to specify the wording for a statement about reproduction rights.
“Most of what we get from the university is going to be copyright-free because it’s public property,” Taylor says. “So there is no problem with displaying a low-resolution image, but campus departments will be able to decide about access to high-resolution copies.”
The Albert Gore Sr. Research Center, the university’s major repository of historical information and artifacts, will be a substantial part of the Memory Project.
“Dr. [Lisa] Pruitt (Gore Center director) has been very cooperative, and we do know that they have a lot of material over there,” Taylor says. “Exactly what we’ll be able to bring over and get digitized, we’re not sure.”
However, the archivists are not content to look in every nook and cranny of the campus itself. If it’s in an attic, a piano bench, or a living room bookshelf, the librarians want to make a digital image of it and preserve it for all time to come.
For more information, contact Middleton at 615-898-8524 or kmiddlet@mtsu.edu or Taylor at 615-898-5605 or mtaylor@mtsu.edu. Information also is available at http://library.mtsu.edu/digitalprojects.

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