[Music- “Muzarka Op. 67 in A minor”]
[Professor Thomas Slaughter] The Seward Family Archive is a digital humanities
project the University of Rochester that brings together students, undergraduates, and graduates,
to work in collaboration with River Campus Libraries.
[Autumn Haag] The Seward Family Collection is, gosh, it is
just fabulous because it’s huge. It encompasses so many different kinds of records, so, letters
and government documents, and, you know, diplomatic information and records, and business records,
family records, photographs, ledgers, bound books, pamphlets, it’s really the scope
is just so huge and then you get to know this family so well.
[Professor Slaughter] The collection itself is about three-hundred
and fifty thousand pages, a subset of that, twenty, twenty-five thousand pages is family
letters, from the extended family.
[Autumn Haag] So, people come in to do research in a number
of ways, with a collection like the Seward papers there’s an online, finding aid or
inventory that can help people access the material. Normally in the past people would
come into our, library, they would register as a researcher, they would use the material
in our reading room, but the, Seward Digital Project has really opened that up.
[Autumn Haag] I’d say the main challenges to starting
something like the Seward Digital project is, really, sort of, all of the, you need
to set a lot of parameters to start with. So what are, what are you digitizing, what
aren’t you digitizing, who is your audience going to be, are you going to use volunteers,
who is going to manage the volunteers, what are your standards for, say, transcription,
a lot of thought went into how the letters should be transcribed, and so, you really
have to put in a lot of work up front to kind of set your rules and regulations and your
boundaries, and then once everything’s in place you can deal with the hiccups as they
come.
[Professor Slaughter] What we’ve done is we’ve taught the students
how to transcribe and annotate to the standards of the Association of Documentary Editing,
and the NHPRC, we annotate every person, we try to find the birthdate, and the death date,
the relationships of everybody who’s mentioned in the letter, most of the people mentioned
in these letters are not famous people, but we now have electronic databases that enable
us to do this.
[Professor Slaughter] I also observed fairly early on when one of
the graduate students went out to speak in the community about this project, that in
an audience of senior citizens, there were people who very enthusiastically, very eagerly,
and very fluidly could read the cursive handwriting from the nineteenth century, when he projected
a digital image of one of these letters up onto the screen behind him, the people in
in the audience could read it as if they were just reading any page of any book or manuscript
that we might look at. And then he came back and he said “Wow, they are so much better
at reading that than the students are.” It was really exciting because, the idea,
when you think about it, students are very a transient labor force, we have them at undergraduates
for, you know, two years, sometimes three years, once in a very oh I think only in one
case have we had a student for the whole four years that she was here. Graduate students
a little bit better, usually three years, four years, sometimes five years, but there’s
turnover constantly, it has to be built into our model. The senior citizens stay with us
longer, so become more expert and we don’t have to do as much retraining as we used to.
[Autumn Haag] I think people underestimate the amount of
work it takes. It’s very easy to just put something on a scanner, but it is very, very
time consuming to create a whole project that has rigorous standards, to have a team of
volunteers and professionals working to coordinate, the digitization, the metadata, putting things
online, making changes, as the project progresses.
[Professor Slaughter] Starting this project we were very fortunate to get funding from the NHPRC, the Fred L.
Emerson Foundation, and now the Robert D. L. Gardiner Foundation of Long Island, which
has helped us to pay students to work on this project as documentary editors, digitizers,
and to create the metadata and the students learn a tremendous amount about history, about
all the range of humanities questions that we bring to what’s going on here, and also
about connecting to our local community.
[Music- “Muzarka Op. 67 in A minor”]