Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Digitization, Digitization, Digitization!

Snowden Library and the College Archives recently participated in a mass digitization pilot project with 13 other libraries, large and small. The digitization was done by the Internet Archive, a non-profit organization whose purpose is to build an Internet library that offers permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format.

Looking forward to Lycoming’s bicentennial celebration in 2012, we chose to digitize a selection of College yearbooks from different decades of the twentieth century and the History of Lycoming College and its Predecessor Institutions, published in 1958.

Check out our yearbooks and the College history on the Internet Archive site by clicking here. You can browse through the books using the “flip book” viewer, and you can also download PDF copies of each book. The most exciting thing is that now these books are available to anyone, any time, and they’re full-text searchable, too!


Sample page from 1948 Arrow Yearbook.

The program is coordinated by PALINET, a network of more than 600 libraries, archives, and museums in the mid-Atlantic region, with a goal of making electronic copies of interesting books available to the public via the internet. Funding for the project came from the Sloan Foundation.

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