Trails to Utah and the Pacific: Diaries and Letters, 1846-1869
Building the Digital Collection
Brigham Young University and the Utah Academic Libraries
Consortium received an
award in the 1998/1999 round of the Library of Congress/Ameritech
National Digital Library Competition to support the digitization of
diaries
and related
material from a
number of institutions and assembly into an online collection.
The materials document journeys on overland trails to Utah and further
west in the
mid-nineteenth century, before the railroads transformed travel across the
country.
For more detail on different aspects of building this digital collection,
see the sections below.
- Building the
Digital Collection*
The variety of source formats and consortial nature of the project
necessitated development
of format-specific scanning specifications
and use of a variety of scanning equipment. Manuscript diaries
presented particular challenges for transcription and markup.
- Building the
Metadata*
Strategies and procedures for creating the metadata also varied by
format, with MARC catalog records serving, where appropriate, both in
primary library catalogs and as a source for metadata stored in the
digital library system at Brigham Young University. To enhance access to
the diaries, topics, personal names,
geographic names, and trail names were assigned to individual pages.
- Integration into American Memory at the
Library of Congress
Descriptive records and XML versions of the diary transcriptions were
delivered to the Library of Congress and manipulated for compatibility
with the American Memory indexing and interface.
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Trails to Utah and the Pacific