CARA Fall Meeting Highlights Resources for Digital Photo Collections

CARA Fall Meeting

The CARA Fall Meeting took place November 7, 2019 at St. James Commons, thanks to the hospitality of the Episcopal Diocese of Chicago and their historiographer & CARA member, Newland Smith. In addition to approving the revised by-laws, CARA members took in two presentations related to planning, implementing, and sharing collections of digitized photographs.

Virginia Jung, OSB and Kristin Gravelin take note of Malachy McCarthy's talk on best practices for digitization.

Malachy McCarthy shared his experiences over the years in the Claretian Missionaries Archives USA-Canada, particularly what works well and what does not when it comes to digitizing photos. Moving forward in this initiative, has led him to write a well developed Digitization Philosophy Statement. The October 2019 Statement includes points on the Value of Digitization, Presuppositions, Selection, Best Practices, and more. The Statement is educational for archivists and especially can be used as talking points when meeting with leadership and members of the archives' sponsoring religious institutions.

Andrew Bullen, of the Illinois State Library, introduced meeting attendees to the Illinois Digital Archive, an initiative which currently houses 170 individual collections of material related to Illinois and Illinois history.  www.idaillinois.org

CARA members learn from Andrew Bullen how their organizations can participate in the Illinois Digital Archive.
When CARA members decide to get involved in IDA, they will be able to refer to the technical information provided in the papers Andrew discussed and distributed in his talk - Illinois Digital Collection Development Policy, Illinois State Library Digital Imaging Program-Best Practices, and Illinois Digital Archives: Metadata Guidelines.

Since 2000, the Illinois Digital Archives has been providing access to collections of local cultural heritage organizations.

As Technology Coordinator for the Illinois State Library, Andrew Bullen shared how he was able to include sound files for sheet music from World War I, which you can read more about in his article in Code4Lib Journal, Issue 3 | 2008-06-23 Bringing Sheet Music to Life: My Experiences with OMR. OMR is the acronym for Optical Music Recognition. If you are deep into CONTENTdm, you can learn more about its Application Programming Interface (API) in his online book A Cookbook of Methods for Using CONTENTdm's APIs, available at http://www.finditillinois.org/wordpress/


Rebekah McFarland and all of CARA benefit from our colleagues like Andrew Bullen who bring their enthusiasm for their work to our gatherings.



Upcoming Event at Newberry Library

Religion and Culture in the Americas Seminar

Nuns in the World: U.S. Catholic Sisters and Education for Social Justice in the Postwar Decades

Darra Mulderry, Providence College

Friday, December 6, 2019

3 pm to 5 pm

Sponsors:  Albion College; the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame; University of Illinois at Chicago; and Wheaton College.

In the mid-1950s, a national committee of Catholic sisters with Ph.Ds launched a grassroots movement to educate all U.S. sisters in Catholic social teachings. The committee dreamed that the 90,000 sisters who were teaching in U.S. Catholic schools, if better educated, would form a learned army of “sister apostles” well prepared to motivate the laity to strive for economic justice according to a liberal Catholic social vision. In 1956, the committee wrote – and disseminated to all 377 women’s orders - a bachelor’s curriculum for young nuns that highlighted instruction in the social sciences and Catholic ethics. Darra Mulderry will share an excerpt from her book manuscript about the origins of this sisters’ curriculum for social justice, chronicling the curriculum’s impact on U.S. sisters’ pre- and post-Vatican II guiding ideals and ministry.


Respondent: Kathy Cummings, University of Notre Dame

Newberry Scholarly Seminars papers are pre-circulated electronically. If you plan to attend, contact scholarlyseminars@newberry.org for a copy. Please do not request a paper unless you plan to attend.