The UW-Stout University Archives is
pleased to announce a new digital collection of Stout Student Organization
photographs. During the spring 2018 semester, the archives undertook a multi-step
digitization project to digitize their Iconographic Series 3 collection of
Student Organization photographs, ca. 1910-2000. This collection includes 870
photographs of Greek fraternities and sororities, and athletic, academic,
literary, music, religious, social service, career-related, and men’s and women’s
organizations. There are formal member group photographs, which many can be
found in UW-Stout’s Tower yearbooks (1909-1989), and informal photographs showing
activities, such as dances, field trips, picnics, concerts, homecoming
activities and Greek initiations.
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| Stout Orchestra group photo, 1921 |
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| Stout Typographical Society Field Trip, Green Bay, WI, 1946-47 |
The photographs are hosted by the
University of Wisconsin Digital Collections Center (UWDCC) based in Madison,
Wisconsin. The UWDCC was created to help University of Wisconsin schools and other
entities digitize, provide access to, and maintain digital projects. The
University of Wisconsin Digitized Collections (UWDC) were established in 2001
to provide quality digital resources from it’s University of Wisconsin Academic
Libraries.
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| UWDCC website, UW-Stout Collection page |
This project represents excellent work
by two Stout Archives staff members. Archives student worker Katie Hagen scanned
and numbered the 870 photographs according to UWDCC guidelines. As scanning
progressed, Archives Assistant Julie Hatfield started looking through each
individual folder of photographs to measure each photograph, rescan any
photographs if necessary, move photographs to their correct folders that were initially
identified with the wrong student organization, and conduct research from
information found with the photographs and within UW-Stout archival collections
to properly date and identify who and what was happening in each photograph. As
Julie started researching, she realized that many photographs were taken for a
purpose, with many being published in The Tower yearbooks, Stoutonia student
newspaper, or other Stout produced publications. She searched through The Tower
yearbooks, Stoutonia, student organization collections housed in the archives, information
on the UW-Stout website; and Google photos, keyword searching, and Wikipedia to
help identify period clothing, people, activities, and events that were known
on a state or national level.
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Stout Student Org. Photo collection, 8 boxes
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| Research Resources |
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| Scanning photographs |
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| Measuring photos |
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| Researching for information on photograph |
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| Researching for information on same photograph |
Julie created a Metadata Excel Sheet
to input all of the corresponding box, folder, object ID numbers, research
information and subject headings for each photograph. From the information
found on each photograph and student organization, Julie had to identify potential
subject headings to be used for keyword searching on the UWDCC website. A
combination of local subjects (Stout based) and Library of Congress Subject
Headings (LCSH). It is important to keep consistent use of subject headings
throughout a collection, and not use multiple variations of a group name or
activity, or mix singular and plural usage. But you still need to use subject
headings that will most likely be used by researchers, and sometimes that does
involve the use of a singular and plural form of a word, or two names a group
goes by. It depends if you know multiple names were frequently used for one group. |
| Metadata excel sheet |
During the summer and fall of 2019, Julie
refined and uploaded the metadata for each photograph into the UWDCC FileMaker
Pro database. Julie sent the digital TIFF photograph files on an external hard
drive to Madison through the University Red Box delivery system, for the UWDCC
staff to upload into their database. The availability of the collection was
delayed by upgrades to the UWDCC digital collections database, but in November
2020 the collection became publicly available online to search and browse by
the UW-Stout community and beyond.
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| Searching the Stout Digital Collection |
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| Example of digital photo search result |
This student organization collection
joins another Stout collection hosted by UWDCC featuring 500 photographs of
educational activities in classrooms, shops, and laboratories.
Search and browse UW-Stout collections
via the UWDCC website: https://search.library.wisc.edu/digital/AUWStout
Check out our “Campus Photographs” and
other digital collections, tutorials, and library database links, on the
UW-Stout Archives Digital Collections webpage:
https://library.uwstout.edu/friendly.php?s=digitalprimarysources
Tower
Yearbooks (1909-1989): https://archive.org/details/toweryearbook?&sort=date
