February 16, 2009

Digital archive of Debris yearbook joins 'Purdue History in Print' collection on e-Archives

The project, funded by the alumni association and development office and spearheaded by the Libraries' digital initiatives team, includes more than 56,000 images from the Debris spanning from 1889-2007. The entire collection is keyword-searchable, with the options to search all books or search within a specific year's edition.

The digitizing of the Debris is part of Archives and Special Collections' mission to share Purdue history with the largest possible audience through its e-Archives collection.

"Our staff has really embraced the charge to preserve and promote Purdue's proud history," said Sammie Morris, head of Archives and Special Collections. "We had staff monitoring the quality of the scanning, managing metadata to optimize searching, and coordinating the overall project to help provide this valuable digital resource."

Purdue's Debris yearbook was continuously published from 1889 through 2007 and was a self-supporting publication managed by students on the West Lafayette campus. In 2008, the student staff chose to stop publishing a yearbook due to increasing costs and a decline in orders.

The digitized Debris joins a growing collection of "Purdue History in Print" available on e-Archives. Other items that have been scanned and are keyword-searchable include the Purdue Board of Trustees minutes, Purdue's policy archives, Krannert Magazine, and key books on Purdue history including "A Century and Beyond" by Robert W. Topping and "Purdue University, Fifty Years of Progress" by William Hepburn and Louis Sears.

The Purdue History in Print collection is available at https://earchives.lib.purdue.edu/about/phprint/. To view and search the Debris, visit https://earchives.lib.purdue.edu/about/debris/.

Purdue's Archives and Special Collections e-Archives now includes more than 107,000 digitized items including photos, letters, university documents, videos, transcripts and sound recordings. Specific digitized collections include the George Palmer Putnam Collection of Amelia Earhart Papers and a section on Earhart's time at Purdue, a visual history of the university, photos of Purdue's alumni astronauts and more at https://e-archives.lib.purdue.edu.

The collections in e-Archives are one part of the overall e-Scholar system, Purdue Libraries' online information portal that provides increased access to data, primary source material and publications generated at the university.

Another of the system's components, e-Pubs, gives access to dissertations, reports, papers and other scholarly publications written or organized by members of the Purdue community. The third component, e-Data, still in its development stages, allows researchers from around the world to share data sets.

"What Purdue has created through e-Scholar is a great mechanism for researchers to gather a wealth of Purdue information without having to do repetitive searches from a variety of sites, but it's not only for researchers." Morris said. "Alumni, schoolchildren and members of the public will enjoy interacting with the Purdue timeline, watching old newsreel footage of campus, or browsing the Amelia Earhart collection with its photos and documents on a well-known figure in American history."

Writer: Kayla Gregory, (765) 496-9610, kgregory@purdue.edu

Source: Sammie Morris, (765) 494-2905, morris18@purdue.edu

Purdue News Service: (765) 494-2096; purduenews@purdue.edu

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