Screen shot of the Diary of Major Milsaps as displayed on HPL’s Digital Archives Website

A while back, the Houston Public Library put out a call for volunteers to help scan physical objects from their archival collections for inclusion in their digital archives, and I signed up. For the last few Wednesdays, I’ve been spending two hours after work scanning the Diaries of Major John Milsaps, and here is the result. This is the first of several of Milsaps’ Diaries.

These diaries are interesting, as they document Milsaps time in the Philippines during the Philippine-American War. They are loaded with photgraphs of people from both sides.

So go and check them out! And while you’re at it, take a look at some of the other stuff in the digital archives.

And how come I always have to be the patron?

Every institution, no matter how big or how small, should have a mechanism for documenting its history. Something that commemorates failures, so as not to repeat them, and celebrates victories, so that future generations might be inspired to do greater things.

I am very happy to announce that after several years in the making, the University of Houston-Downtown has such a mechanism: http://archives.uhd.edu

Through the hard work and perseverance of several here in the W.I. Dykes Library, we now have a subscription to OCLC’s CONTENTdm archival hosting service. In addition to this, the library is also hiring an archivist to coordinate our physical and digital collecting initiatives.

While we don’t have much on the archives site yet – there’s only one collection that’s been uploaded to demonstrate and experiment with various features of CONTENTdm – and our indexing is a little wonky – for some reason CONTENTdm has decided that “set” and “may” are important words – it’s a start.

Over the next few months, I plan to experiment with backchannel feedback during some smaller presentations. You can follow my feedback experiment at http://twitter.com/billyhoya or using the Twitter widget at http://billyhoya.info/twitter/.