Trails to Utah and the Pacific: Diaries and Letters, 1846-1869

Building the Digital Collection

Brigham Young University and the Utah Academic Libraries Consortium received an award in the 1998/1999 round of the Library of Congress/Ameritech National Digital Library Competition to support the digitization of diaries and related material from a number of institutions and assembly into an online collection. The materials document journeys on overland trails to Utah and further west in the mid-nineteenth century, before the railroads transformed travel across the country.

For more detail on different aspects of building this digital collection, see the sections below.

• Building the Digital Collection (external link)
  The variety of source formats and consortial nature of the project necessitated development of format-specific scanning specifications and use of a variety of scanning equipment. Manuscript diaries presented particular challenges for transcription and markup.
• Building the Metadata (external link)
  Strategies and procedures for creating the metadata also varied by format, with MARC catalog records serving, where appropriate, both in primary library catalogs and as a source for metadata stored in the digital library system at Brigham Young University. To enhance access to the diaries, topics, personal names, geographic names, and trail names were assigned to individual pages.
• Integration into American Memory at the Library of Congress
  Descriptive records and XML versions of the diary transcriptions were delivered to the Library of Congress and manipulated for compatibility with the American Memory indexing and interface.