Digital Library Services

Digital library fellow Jane Monson channeled her inner foodie to create the Recipe Pamphlets from the Szathmary Culinary Arts Digital Collection. Bravely wading through a physical collection of over 4000 pamphlets, Jane selected a representative sampling of several dozen items for digitization, resulting in over 1300 scanned and full text searchable pages from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Collectively, they illustrate changes in the American diet as industrialization gave rise to the modern food industry.  

Name: Jane Monson
Hometown: Iowa City, Iowa
Pre-SLIS education: University of Iowa - B.A. in Comparative Literature
DLS Project: Recipe Pamphlets from the Szathmary Culinary Arts Collection
Why did you choose this project? I thought it looked like a good way to combine my interests in history and food.
Most enjoyable project experience? Selecting pamphlets for the collection and designing the web interface.
Most difficult/challenging experience? Working around copyright limitations and the slow pace of production work.
What did you learn that surprised you? I hadn’t realized how significant an issue copyright could be in collection planning.
Favorite item in the collection? Wrigley’s “Mother Goose”: Introducing the Sprightly Spearmen - This pamphlet combines silly rhymes and puns with colorful illustrations to create the most engaging advertising artifact in the collection.  It’s fun to read, and provides a window into the early 20th-century American sense of humor.  Plus, who knew Wrigley’s spearmint gum has been around so long?

This week marks the 101^st anniversary of the publication of Jay Norwood ‘Ding’ Darling’s first cartoon for the Des Moines Register.  To commemorate, UI Libraries has launched The Editorial Cartoons of J.N. ‘Ding’ Darling Digital Collection. The expanded collection now includes more than 10,000 Darling cartoons, a robust Web site contextualizing the collection, and audio recordings of Darling’s dictations that document his voice, vigor, and attitudes about issues ranging from politics to the environment. The collection was spearheaded by the UI Libraries Special Collections Department, which is home to the majority of Darling’s papers.

The Ding Darling Digital Collection is the latest enhancement to the Iowa Digital Library, which contains more than 95,000 digital objects —photographs, maps, sound recordings, and documents—from the holdings of the UI Libraries and numerous collaborators.

To commemorate the anniversary, Des Moines Register columnist Richard Doak wrote a piece in the Sunday newspaper highlighting Darling’s life and encouraging Iowan to make the state a place that Darling would have liked—”open, friendly, clean, teeming with wildlife—and they will come.”  Access the article at http://www.desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2007712090315

University News Services Press release:
http://news-releases.uiowa.edu/2007/december/120707ding_darling_library.html

–Nicole Saylor, Head, Digital Library Services

While we’re sad that our initial cohort of digital library fellows will soon be leaving DLS, we’re proud of the excellent work they’ve done and the high quality digital collections they’ll be leaving behind. This week, we’re profiling Jill Wehrheim, who digitized almost 1600 pages from over a dozen items drawn from the Libraries’ holdings of Civil War diaries written by Iowa soldiers. Thanks to Jill’s efforts, these fragile, unique materials are now globally accessible, full-text searchable, and at decreased risk of damage from handling of the originals.

Name: Jill Wehrheim
Hometown: Red Bud, Illinois
Pre-SLIS education: Southeast Missouri State University - B.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies with emphases in English, history, and mass communications
DLS project: Civil War Diaries Digital Collection
Why did you choose this project? I have always been interested in history, especially the American Civil War, so this project matched my interests in history and digital libraries perfectly.
Most enjoyable project experience? I really enjoyed learning the basic process of how items go from sitting in boxes in Special Collections to being digitized and available online for anyone to view. I love the idea that by digitizing collections, we can make local items available for long-distance users.
Most difficult/challenging experience? The most challenging part of working on this project was beginning. It was difficult to narrow the scope to a manageable size for this semester.
What did you learn that surprised you? It was a little surprising to realize that digital library work is never truly finished. New items can always be added to the collection. This makes it harder to move on to other projects.
Favorite item in the collection? My current favorite digital object in my collection is Jacob Harrison Allspaugh’s 1862-1863 diary. On the last few pages of the diary, he had drawn four pictures.

As Iowa City continues to recover from last weekend’s ice storm, we thought we’d feature scenes from winters past on the Iowa Digital Library home page, drawn from the Iowa City Town and Campus Digital Collection. Included are images such as an 1869 photograph of a sparsely populated Pentacrest, shown below along with a few bonus wintry items from other IDL collections.

Inside the library, things are warming up as we work hard to finish the last of our big projects for the year. For DLS, that means the official debut of the Ding Darling collection; for our IMLS Fellows, that means wrapping up their projects before moving on to new assignments next semester. Stay tuned for more info as we launch these collections in the coming weeks.

–Jen Wolfe
Metadata Librarian, Digital Library Services

View of the University of Iowa Pentacrest (Tricrest?) in 1869, before Schaeffer Hall and Macbride Hall were built

UI student Margaret Hall making a snowball, late 1920s

An attractive centerpiece and an enjoyable time at the Prescott, Iowa, Rainbow Girls 4-H Club meeting, Dec. 31, 1931

Cover of 1949 children’s novel by UI alum and Nancy Drew author Mildred Wirt Benson

No love for Santa at the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) Christmas party, Davenport, Iowa, 1960s

“Winter Wonderland” by Christine Buckton, UI MFA in Painting and Drawing, 2002