After a long planning and buildout period, the Clark Library’s new Digitization Studio, or DigiLab as we call it, is now fully installed and in use. What began as a proposal to move us away from ad hoc, semi-unpredictable, request-based digitization toward a more programmatic model has, over the last ten months, become a fully functional and foundational part of library operations. Krystal Boehlert, our Digital Collections Librarian and newest staff member, envisioned a studio aligned with the professional standards and capture capabilities of leading cultural heritage digitization programs. Drawing on her prior experience implementing a similar project at UC Riverside, she articulated a clear design concept and vision that enabled us to move from concept to reality.
Determining its location was part of a broader rethinking of the North Range. This area has long been thought of as an underused part of the Clark campus—poor Gatehouse notwithstanding. We have been able to convert one wing into a dedicated space that meets a critical service need for remote access to our collections, while also creating room for born-digital processing and other technology-driven projects as staffing and resources allow. Equipment arrived in December, installation and training followed in February, and since then we have been steadily transitioning into production. The result is a space adapted to the needs of cultural heritage digitization, with more stable equipment conditions, controlled light, safer staging and handling areas, and room to plan and manage projects with greater care.
Even a few months in, the benefits are already visible. Early work in the lab has included capture of the 4×5 photographic negatives in the Farquhar photo albums (documenting the library’s construction), done in anticipation of our centennial celebrations; programmatic, patron-driven digitization (capturing entire works instead of sections); and the start of what will inevitably be a long-in-the-making but incredibly popular digital collection, the Oscar Wilde correspondence. Perhaps the DigiLab’s most important change is a structural one. It gives the Clark the capacity to build digital collections more intentionally and treat digitization as a core part of our library mission, acknowledging that travel, sadly, has become increasingly an obstacle in research these days. There are still practical matters to refine, including networking infrastructure and continued integration with systems like Aeon, but those are the kinds of issues that come, rather reassuringly, from an active lab rather than a hypothetical one. For us, that is real progress.
-Derek Quezada Meneses, Head Librarian, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library