Organizing Centennial Resources Using Dataverse

Abstract

Background: The hospital is preparing to celebrate its centennial and the librarian had been asked to help gather materials. While many items were found, there was not a way to systematically organize and locate the items. Objectives: Many items were collected for the hospital’s centennial including hospital publications, scrapbooks, photos, and newspaper articles. The Librarian sought out how best to organize these items and make them findable for staff as well as members of the local historical societies. Description: After reviewing repository options, the librarian used Harvard’s Dataverse to create a catalog that can be accessed by staff and local historical groups. Hospital published materials as well as newspaper articles related to the opening of the hospital were cataloged in Dataverse. Each item was tagged with metadata. Images and hospital publications were uploaded to be accessible directly from Dataverse. When copyright allowed, newspaper articles were also uploaded directly to Dataverse. Results: The outcome is a searchable resource of the hospital’s centennial information that is currently still being added to. Standard naming conventions for newspaper articles proved to be challenging with multiple people scanning microfilm. Having a clear naming convention at the start would have saved time at later stages. Conclusion: This project allowed the librarian to demonstrate to leadership team members that there is more to library services than books and literature searching. The work of the historical research committee is appreciated by the hospital’s leadership team.