Dedicated solely to this project, my first ever (and probably last) sabbatical leave came to an end on June 30, 2023. In my report, I called it “highly successful,” with the main accomplishment being setting up the sustainable Digital Alcohol Studies Archives while achieving all four main goals as planned.
Documenting the progress during the semester on this blog helped me stay focused for six months. Additionally, the details came very handy as I was writing up my report, both for context and language.
Here are some highlights from the report.
Project Summary
Listed on the Rutgers University Libraries Digital Collections portal, the Digital Alcohol Studies Archives Collection is the deliverable of my one-semester sabbatical leave during Spring 2023. Selected from the digital artifacts and remnants of the defunct Alcohol Studies Library and Archives, 1,000+ items have been added to RUcore and Omeka and are now also promoted via its public-facing Drupal-based landing page on the RUL site, featuring a Digital Collections search portal.
Chronicling the birth of alcohol science as it evolved at Yale and Rutgers, a wide array of photographs, lay and scholarly publications, pamphlets, and newsletters, the digital collection of searchable full texts and images now provides access to a great deal of the resources on early alcohol studies history amassed, preserved, and digitized over eighty years.
With its over 1,000 items, the size of the collection speaks for itself. One “item” can be a single image, with a detailed description, or a 100-page document collated from several related texts, all indexed, OCR- ed, and full-text searchable.
Items in RUcore are now accessible and discoverable via multiple service points:
Rutgers University Libraries Digital Collections portal
Digital Alcohol Studies Archives Collection – public-facing Drupal page
Digital Collections search portal on the Drupal page
RUcore search or browse (click for “canned” search to see all items)
Omeka Digital platform
CAS Library page on the CAS website
Final statistics
