Civil War Treasures from the New-York Historical Society
Building the Digital Collection
In June 1998, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded a grant to the Library of Congress to support the digitization of these materials from the New-York Historical Society and their incorporation into American Memory. A team assembled by New York University Libraries provided day-to-day project oversight and operational support for the project. This team set cataloging guidelines and created descriptive metadata records for the items selected from twelve archival collections for incorporation into this online compilation. All scanning was performed at the New-York Historical Society. For some materials, the NYU team performed the scanning on a flat-bed scanner; for others a contractor used a digital camera.
Image files were delivered to the Library of Congress with a database of item-level descriptive catalog records for each of the twelve archival collections included in this online compilation. The online presentation incorporates image files suitable for online reference. Master copies of the images at higher resolution are held by the New-York Historical Society and by the Library of Congress.
The Library of Congress mounted the image files, merged the databases into a single database, and converted the database records to a form for indexing with InQuery to allow full integration into American Memory.
The web pages listed below provide more detail on different aspects of building this digital collection.