David Dillard has a story to tell about Temple University’s Digital Diamond digitizing project: “…for those who would like to see a major chunk of Philadelphia in photographs that can be found through keyword term searches, this resource will be found to be a wonderful treasure.” Read the (somewhat edited) text of his tale below…
David Dillard has a story to tell about Temple University’s Digital Diamond digitizing project: “…for those who would like to see a major chunk of Philadelphia in photographs that can be found through keyword term searches, this resource will be found to be a wonderful treasure.” Read the (somewhat edited) text of his tale below…Temple University Libraries uses an online catalog provided by Innovative
Interfaces, Inc. (III).
Do I detect a yawn in about the fifth row?
One capability of this online catalog system is that it permits the
creation of an archive database online.
The Philadelphia Bulletin was the evening newspaper in Philadelphia and
one of great cultural importance as it was the Philadelphia newspaper that
carried Dennis the Menace. Not unlike daily evening newspapers everywhere
in the United States, the evening news on television from the 1950’s
onward gradually eroded the market for the paper, bad management at its
end did not help and the revitalization of the Philadelphia Inquirer
after its purchase by Knight-Ridder also helped put the Bulletin further
on the defensive.
Hence while the Philadelphia Inquirer was experimenting with the creation
of full text newspaper databases of the Philadelphia Inquirer and of the
Philadelphia Daily News in a system called Vu-Text, renamed after the
ABI-Inform folks got a bit unhappy over the original name for these
newspaper databases, In-Form, the Philadelphia Bulletin was quietly going
out of business about the same time department store chain John Wanamaker
was sold to Carter Hawley Hale.
A newspaper morgue is a journalists name for the newspaper library. The
newspaper morgue of the Philadelphia Bulletin was taken from the Bulletin
headquarters of the newspaper at 30th and Market Streets to the basement
of Paley Library, Temple University’s main library. It sat there with
substantial visitors using its hand indexing of news events, no full text
online database here in this declining newspaper, and its extensive
photograph collection acquired in the course of covering news stories for
many decades. Along came the internet, digitization projects and grants
to, pardon the expression, change this picture.
The founder of Temple University, Russell Conwell, was and is famous for
his Acres of Diamonds speech from the period of the Horatio Alger myth.
Hence the word diamond gets heavy use around the Temple Campuses despite
the lack of jewelry stores on or around these campuses. The faculty club
is called the Diamond Club and the library online catalog system is called
Diamond.
The project to digitize photographs from the Philadelphia Bulletin
collection of photos was therefore named Digital Diamond.
A total of 42,115 items have been scanned for this grant: 1,015
slides from the Betancourt Slide Collection; 1,626 posters from the Tyler
War Poster Collection; 23,461 photographs from the McDowell Philadelphia
Evening Bulletin Collection; 790 photographs from the YWCA Philadelphia
Branches collection; 5,898 slides from the C. William Fox Architectural
Slide Collection; 5,176 from the collection of nineteenth and early
twentieth century photographs; 146 pieces of sheet music (939 pages);
1,780 horticulture slides; 1,087 images from the Bush Brown collection;
and 1,136 articles for electronic reserve. To access the items that have
been cataloged and are currently available go to the III driven Digital Diamond. [Plans for expanding Digital Diamond: Phase II]
So for those who would like to see a major chunk of Philadelphia in
photographs that can be found through keyword term searches, this resource
will be found to be a wonderful treasure.
Recent Comments