Pandemic Projects: Avon’s digitizes their 10,000th item
The Avon Free Public Library joined CTDA in December 2014, the fourth entity to do so, and added our first item to the repository (an image of Towpath School) on February 15, 2015.
We focused on digitizing our most popular, most requested collections first. The historic items that that answer essential questions for our residents: Who were we?(C.B. Hadsell Photos) What were we doing? (World War II Newsletters) Where were we doing it? (Historic Homes).
Those early days of digitizing were clunky; we didn’t understand Islandora, didn’t have our workflow patterns down; didn’t estimate our time correctly. Everything took longer than we expected, and we regularly exclaimed, “I think I broke CTDA!”(To date, we have never actually caused a server crash or jammed the mechanisms that power the repository.)
As we gained confidence with the forms and interface of CTDA, we expanded beyond photos and newsletters, uploading the index to our Map Collection, and a pdf of our Vital Records, 1700–1900.
Our process of labeling, sorting, scanning, and uploading items within the history room has been refined, providing each librarian on our reference team with a collection they’re responsible for. We use digitizing as a supplemental project, attending to an assigned collections during quieter moments of the public service day.
Our 10,000 item, uploaded in December 2020, was part of the June 1974 issue of Lure of Litchfield Hills, a local magazine published between 1940 to the mid 1970’s. It’s one of the many collections we’ve been focusing on since the Covid-19 Pandemic began. Our Land Deeds and Unidentified Photos give our patrons a portal to history they couldn’t otherwise access when the pandemic closed our physical building in Spring of 2020.
At the beginning of this project, digitizing 10,000 items seems like an epic, abstract goal. Now when colleagues ask us how to accomplish this volume of work we can confidently answer, “one item at a time.”
