This document summarizes digital projects at Oklahoma State University (OSU) Special Collections and University Archives (SCUA). It describes the initial OAMC WWI Veteran questionnaire digitization project which involved scanning, metadata creation, and uploading the collection. Lessons learned included standardizing metadata and file formats early. Further projects included digitizing other military collections, a women's college collection, agricultural extension materials, and botanical illustrations. Factors for prioritizing projects included relevance, public interest, and feasibility within semester timeframes. Digital projects provide valuable experience for directed course projects.

1. Digital Projects at
OSU
Sarah Coates, Special Collections and University Archives,
Oklahoma State University
sarah.coates@okstate.edu

2. The beginning….
• While OSU had several digital projects already in the works
and online, few of them were of Special Collections’ (SCUA)
material
• In September 2011, I found some old questionnaires that had
been sent out to WWI veterans of OAMC while looking for
material for an exhibit
• There were roughly 400 questionnaires, and as there was
some valuable historical information (photos, camps
attended, and stories), it was decided that we should create a
digital collection

3. The OAMC WWI collection
• Several students and I scanned in the questionnaires from
September-November 2011.
• We decided on how we wanted to do the metadata for the
collection, and then began entering in metadata. With several
students, metadata entry took a little under a month.

4. Metadata
• The metadata for this collection consisted of the answers to
the questions on the questionnaire and some other
identifiers, such as the file type and size of the images.
• As there were several students entering metadata, the subject
and keywords were not all standardized, and since the
handwritten questionnaires could be difficult to
decipher, there were some inconsistencies in spellings.

5. The project itself
• At this point, I took over the project
as it became my Directed Project for
class credit at OU.
• I standardized all of the metadata,
went through our yearbooks to see
if there were other soldiers who had
not returned their questionnaire,
added those missing soldiers’
yearbook photos to our metadata,
and then wrote webpages to give
context for the collection, and
uploaded it to ViewShare (and later,
CONTENTdm)
• Collection can be viewed here:
http://bit.ly/XKjUvt

6. Lessons Learned
• This was the first digital collection I did on my own, and I
learned a lot from it.
• Lesson 1: Come up with standards for your metadata before
you start, especially if there are several people writing it all at
once; i.e., decide if you want it to be U.S. Navy, US Navy, Navy,
or all three
• Lesson 2: Learn what limitations/requirements your CMS has
before you start converting file types.
• ViewShare did not accept PDFs (learned after I had already made
the multi-page surveys and letters into PDFs and added the
filename to my metadata). CONTENTdm needs to have a multi-
item document in a compound object, which requires separate
metadata sheets for each of those documents.

7. • Lesson 3: Never underestimate the value of having excellent
people help you with your questions about how to upload to
CONTENTdm, create metadata, modify metadata for
CONTENTdm, etc. Ask often and early to avoid having to re-do
things
• Lesson 4: Have a clear set of guidelines and tasks assigned to
each person. I had a list of boxes and folders that were
assigned to each student to scan, and later, a similar list for
metadata so that nothing got repeated

8. New Projects….
• As a direct result of this OAMC WWI project, we in SCUA
began to actively seek out and digitize more materials in an
effort to get our materials online.
• Using what I learned from the WWI project, I set up plans of
action for these new projects and oversaw them
• All of these collections have been started since this January,
with two stated exceptions

9. John Hayes White
• We received a collection of 13 letters, a few booklets, and 78
photos from a relative of John Hayes White, who lived in
Oklahoma and fought during WWI.
• I digitized this collection, created its metadata, transcribed the
letters, and uploaded it to CONTENTdm and ViewShare. This
collection is currently complete and is waiting for the “go” to
be made public. This collection was completed in May 2012.

10. Jessie Thatcher Bost
• The first female
graduate of OAMC
(1897)
• Her collection consists
of speeches, class
notebooks,
photographs, and
other early OAMC
memorabilia
• This collection is
currently being
scanned

11. WAVES
• OSU had a Navy WAVES
school (Women Accepted
for Voluntary Emergency
Service) from 1942-1945.
• We have students scanning
in articles from our alumni
magazine, yearbooks, phot
ographs, and other
materials. They also
scanned in over 10,000
registration cards
• Metadata is currently being
created for this collection

12. Vingie Roe
• Vingie Roe attended OAMC for a
semester, and then went on to
write many novels that had a
theme of a romanticized wild
west.
• Her collection contains a
scrapbook, photographs,
correspondence, and her novels.
• We have digitized her scrapbook
and photographs as well as her
novels that were published pre-
1923.
• This collection is also in the
process of being uploaded

13. Bellamy Parks Jansen
• This collection contains thousands of Jansen’s botanical
illustrations. Many of them are photocopies of her originals,
but there are some originals included in the collection.
• A botany student is currently identifying these plants and
creating metadata for the collection. Scanning is also
underway.

14. Agricultural Cooperative
Extension
• Our Extension Service publishes many newsletters and other
materials that are scattered across lots of websites. This digital
collection (so far) consists of us uploading our born digital
copies of these publications and gathering them in one place.
• This was begun in September 2012 and is still ongoing.
• Currently, there are over 1,900 items uploaded to its
CONTENTdm collection
• The goal is to eventually scan in and upload all of our
extension materials, some of which date back to 1890. This
would add over 10,000 more documents to the existing born
digital items

15. How did we decide what to
digitize?
• We looked at our main area of interest, which is Women’s
Archives, and found collections we thought would be of
interest to the public and did those first.
• We also have a great deal of military collections, and looked at
those as well.
• We also looked at what we already had in a digital format so
that we could save time scanning
• Choosing smaller collections that can be scanned quickly and
that can have metadata entered quickly also helped us get
these projects moving faster

16. Digital Projects=Directed
Projects
• I would recommend doing a digital project as a Directed
Project for course credit
• Invaluable digitizing experience, project
management, metadata experience, etc.
• Choose something relevant to your library’s interests, that
would get used by the public, and that would be small enough
to do in a semester
• The WWI collection has been viewed 600 times in Feb. 2013, and
the Ag Cooperative Extension collection was viewed over 4,000
times in Feb. 2013
• Use this chance to work with your digital department/archives
to gain experience that you can take to other libraries/jobs.
Digitizing is big, and knowing how to create digital collections
will only help you