Caller: “I Have This Stuff…” Cynthia Horne, Manager of Access Services Brandon Gipson, Special Collections & Archives North Georgia College & State University Small repository. Small budget. High impact.

No archives, no budget, lots of stuff… Where we started in 2006 Basement room: not properly housed, nothing inventoried, multiple people had keys and would rifle through it, Hot water heater, drains for HVAC, HVAC and water came into building through this room. No archives, no budget, lots of stuff…

Grant + Matching/In-kind = Moderate Interest Our First Project Found in an office storage cabinet. Needed preservation. Team wrote grant, 100 images digitized by the Ga Archives. Moderate interest led to attention for the potential for archives at North Georgia. Grant + Matching/In-kind = Moderate Interest

New Building = New Opportunities Moving, Moving, Moving Allocated money to house the archival materials before move. Move allowed for a bit of inventorying and organization Recognized that some very valuable materials were very fragile… New Building = New Opportunities

Digitizing with Lyrasis Began looking for digitization partners. Servers, housing, maintaining servers and websites, equipment….$$$$$$$$$ Solinet and Lyrasis joined. Lyrasis in the Northeast had existing MDC, which we now had access to. Within 3 week of info session, sent off first project. Partnership: what were we each looking for from each other? Partnership: Everyone brings something to the table.

Reactions to the First Project Alumni promotions. Traffic on Archive.org (# downloads – 1 year) News articles. 1 year, 85 objects = 10,000 downloads. Yes. 10K.

Subsequent Projects Filling in the gaps. 2nd project, how we gathered materials for it using first project as an example. 3rd project (Brandon), how we gathered materials for it, Alumni partnership to promote, eventually donated materials for digitization. Appalachian Studies Center: Vickery collections, transcription projects. Traffic on the Archive.org site (#downloads – 3 years) Filling in the gaps.

Preserving local history The Dahlonega Nugget What is the Dahlonega Nugget? 1890’s-Present. Condition of the Bound Volumes. 1st edition. Contacted Lyrasis. Digitized 1905 and before Preserving local history

Reactions to Digitizing Dahlonega Nugget 1st issue of the Dahlonega Nugget Found. Newspapers, local historic societies, and historians. New Paths… How can we work with the local public library? Microfilmed. Do we want to digitize more of the newspapers? Do we want to become a regional depository for the Dahlonega Nugget? And opportunities for the future.

With or Without a Digitization Partner?

Processing with a Partner Professional Product Servers are maintained Forward Migration – The formats of the photos will be updated. You do not need to be a Professional Archivist. Processing with a Partner They are professional so you don’t have to be.

Processing Internally High Startup Costs (Scanners, Servers, Work area) Dedicated IT professional for server maintenance. Will Digitizing be done by staff or student workers? Student workers are cheaper, but you have higher turnover. How will workers be trained? Time and Labor Intensive Professional Archivist Recommended For a small institution like ours it would be very hard to have the same results without this partnership. A lot to think about…

Bottom Line for North Georgia and Small Repositories Meaningful Partnerships