Community Archives, Digitization, Access, and Preservation Partnership
Partner with VSU Archives and Special Collections
Why have a partnership?
Together we can preserve and document the rich history of South Georgia by digitizing a portion of your holdings, making them available through online repositories at the Valdosta, state, and national levels, and providing long-term security with digital items preserved in a state-of-the-art digital preservation system. Your materials stay in their local homes for community access but will be widely available. You will be able to tell the stories of our area to a national audience.
Keeping Historic Materials Intact
VSU can provide stability and access for your collections in a digital form. We want to support the efforts of South Georgia Community Archives to document the stories of our heritage. Text, photographs, video or audio, or existing digital files can all be included in this partnership. We will meet with you to answer any questions and help you select materials and quantities appropriate for digitization. We look forward to getting to know you.
"The goal of this program is to bring important historical information into the state and national mainstream so that our area can be appreciated and understood."
What you can expect from Digitizing Collection
VSU Archives and Special Collections will help you select materials for scanning, then digitize these items, create metadata, put them in a variety of databases, and preserve those images according to best practices digital preservation program.
A Thank You from Us...
We would like to thank everyone that has been a part of keeping our history alive by preserving what we can so that we may learn about our past and by keeping those before us connected South Georgia.
Our Products and Services
Established in 1983 housed on the 4th floor of Odum Library, the Archives contains two climate control vaults, state of the art digitizing equipment. Our project involves digitization, metadata creation, making items accessible through our own Institutional Repository Vtext, Digital Library of Georgia (DLG), Georgia Knowledge Repository (GKR), a statewide consortium of University System of Georgia Institutional Repositories, and through other national partners such as the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). These items will also be accessible through library catalogs, state-wide and nationally. They will be digitally preserved by our best practices digital preservation program, including three backups with servers, hard drives, and cloud storage, using standards created by the archival profession to preserve digital items. We will work with a variety of formats, from text, photographs, video and audio, and existing digital files that document your area. One of our goals is to help lead you to other Georgia digitizing options afterwards.
How do you get Started Digitizing with VSU?
Start by contacting VSU Archives and Special Collections to discuss what collection(s) you would like to have digitized and we will work with you to address:
- The volume of materials VSU can digitize for you.
- The items that are ideal to digitize.
- Copyright and permission issues to consider.
- Give you a project detail letter and Community Archives Digital partnerships permission form.
- Intake procedures and Deadlines.
- How the materials will be accessed across multiple platforms.
- You keep the original, plus digital copies and access to our Institutional Repository
Who We Are
Douglas Carlson: Archives Director, MLIS Librarian, a DAS Certified Archivist, with six years of experience working in Archives as the processing archivist and student supervisor.
Dallas Suttles: a DAS Certified MLIS Librarian and Computer Tech at VSU Archives & Special Collections, oversees the digitization and digital preservation workflows.
We can do site visits!
