Author Archives: kgmatheny

The Civil War’s Lyrical Battlefield

We all know the Civil War had a seismic impact on our country. Did you know that its effects trickled down to the music publishing industry? UA Libraries Special Collections has a lot of 19th and early 20th century sheet … Continue reading

Life in the mines: The UMWA in Alabama

Last year for Labor Day, we shared a link to an interview with Cleatus and Louise Burns, about their experiences working in the coal mines and living in the mining camps in the first half of the 20th century, hazards … Continue reading

A new constellation

Look like a new constellation? Sometime during the night last night, a tiny dusty gecko fell from the ceiling onto the plate glass for one of our overhead cameras, and our Digitization Manager captured this remarkable image. Meet our new … Continue reading

Snapshot into the 1960s with student magazine Farrago

Welcome back, students! I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that we’re just over a week away from the first football game of the season! Did you know that a UA student magazine, Farrago, interviewed Bear Bryant at the … Continue reading

Digital Services is hiring!!

We are looking for two very capable, talented people to join our team! Are you tech-savvy, self-motivated, a great team player with terrific attention to detail? We continually seek improvement, and work in a fast-paced production environment. Our Digitization Technologist … Continue reading

Tag the University of Alabama Photos!

The University of Alabama Photograph Collection is now available for TAGGING! This collection includes more than five thousand black and white photographs illustrating the history of The University of Alabama from the middle of the 19th century through the early … Continue reading

Early history of the University of Alabama?

We’ve just loaded a box of the Manly Family papers into the transcription interface, in the hopes that YOU would like to transcribe correspondence and diaries relating to the early history of the University of Alabama. Basil Manly, Sr. (1798-1868) … Continue reading

Adventures in geocoding

Last November, I was excited to read a D-Lib article on leveraging Google Map APIs to generate latitude/longitude values from locations, then generating files which could be uploaded to create embeddable maps of content. I explored and mapped out the … Continue reading

Low-cost overhead capture system

A couple of years ago, we did an in-house analysis of scanning speeds versus costs, and determined that overhead capture systems provided the most captures per dollar spent. Since all the vendors speak very highly of their capture systems, we … Continue reading

Low-cost digitization of manuscript materials

Just published! DeRidder, Jody L.; Presnell, Amanda Axley; and Walker, Kevin W. “Leveraging Encoded Archival Descriptions for Access to Digital Content: A Cost and Usability Analysis,” in American Archivist (Spring/Summer 2012), Vol. 75, Iss. 1. Back in 2010, we were … Continue reading