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The Shatford Library is in the process of digitizing years of school archival documents and historical photos. The project is being spearheaded by library director Mary Ann Laun.”Photos range from clubs and student activities to departmental and divisional activities, though at this point, it is unclear what the oldest photographs are,” said Laun.

Before undertaking the project, Laun spent time researching the digitalization efforts of other community colleges. One of her goals was to identify “priorities for resources currently being digitized and priorities for campuses that have not started to digitize resources.”

She also identified barriers to digitization activities and “raised awareness of digitization activities in community college libraries.”

To collect a wide variety of material, Laun did a survey of department managers, asking for an inventory of resources to be digitized, including photographs.

“I had great responses. Thirty-five of the 50 managers responded and six additional faculty,” Laun said, noting that on the day of the interview the business department had just sent in some photos.

For its part, the Courier is contributing 30-years-worth of published and unpublished work done by photojournalism students. The newspaper has a wealth of photos from extracurricular activities taken throughout the years. The photojournalism department made the switch to digital in 2004, according to photo instructor Rachel Fermi.

Some of the scanned photos have already been uploaded to a purchased CONTENTdm database, though the library has yet to prepare the database for public web view, Laun said.

Special funding will be needed, so Laun has written an EMC Heritage Trust grant to help the project get off its feet.

The grant will be a demonstration project to – among other things – “develop policies and procedures to digitize community college archives and records” and “promote the project to other community colleges in California and nationwide,” Laun explained.

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