Partnering for Success
By Team Lead Marcia Spicer How many times have you encountered good work that didn’t quite meet your needs? I recently spoke with an organization that just concluded work with a digitization vendor. The vendor performed high quality digitization work—I can confirm. However, the manner in which the files were delivered made them essentially unusable […]
Exploring Family History Worry-Free
POW belt buckle. Image provided by Christopher Parrish and used with permission. By Team Lead Marcia Spicer While much of the country braced for a pre-Christmas polar vortex and snowstorm, I got to speak with Christopher and Molly Parrish via Teams from our respective homes. The Anderson Archival team has fond memories of digitizing their […]
A Gift to the Future: 3 Goals of Digital Heritage and the Archives Showcasing Them
Why are collectors, organizations, and institutions bringing their collections into the digital age? What makes the effort and cost of digital conservation worthwhile? As users, we can’t know the primary driving force behind the digitization of some of the most impactful collections on the internet, but at Anderson Archival, we’ve seen countless motivations for digitization. […]
Reconnecting with Corporate History Through a Functional Archive
What do local historians and corporations around the country have in common? One answer: a passion for historical corporate legacy. St. Louis-based Guarantee Electrical Company has been lighting up communities since its inception in 1902 to power the 1904 World’s Fair. Over a century later, Guarantee continues to impact not only the St. Louis skyline […]
Access to Your Archive: Make It Easy, Make a Difference
Why digitize? This is the question many archive owners, collectors, and curators face. In an increasingly digital world, analog access to collections and archives is still the norm. But should it be? A Philosophical Question If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? […]
Chronicling America One Newspaper at a Time
by Shana Scott Above photo from neh.gov Newspapers are unique cultural artifacts that give a broad sense of the world at the time of their printing. The articles may show what was considered important to people, but ads, classifieds, and comics all offer a window into the lives of the public. Newspapers become a snapshot […]
World Digital Preservation Day
by Shana Scott The first Thursday in November is World Digital Preservation Day (WDPD). This year that falls on November 3rd. WDPD is a way to celebrate digital preservation’s contributions to the archival community. If you’d like to join in the celebration, the Digital Preservation Coalition has lots of suggestions and ways to participate and […]
Everyone Who Has Gone Before Me: An Interview
For those in my generation, much of our lives have been lived in a wholly digital world. Maybe that’s what makes the collections we work with so fascinating. Instead of being automatically dumped in digital buckets, every album, letter, and photo is curated to what’s most meaningful to the family it belongs to. We recently […]
Three Tips for Keeping Zines Pristine
It’s hard to imagine modern life without our digital communities. Before the days of blogs, Instagram accounts, and podcasts about every subject imaginable, it was harder to find communities for specific topics people loved and wanted to talk about. In the time before the internet’s omnipresence, niche groups had to carve out their own spaces […]
Five Crucial Mistakes Archives Make with OCR
by Marcia Spicer One thing almost every digitization client has in common is a desire to share their collection. That’s great, and it’s a goal digitization works toward almost naturally. But someone has to think about the how. Yes, we want to share, facilitate research, create opportunities for spontaneous discovery of the collection… but how? […]
