Digital Initiatives & Web Services (DIWS) creates and disseminates archival digital assets, supports the Library website and integration of library technologies, and works with partners across campus to ensure long-term, sustainable access to digital content produced by the Library and the College.
Amherst College Digital Collections
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DIWS manages Amherst College Digital Collections (ACDC), a publicly accessible, searchable online repository that houses digitized content from the Archives & Special Collections.
Featured Digital Collections
- Emily Dickinson Collection
- Papers of Edward and Orra White Hitchcock
- Native American Literature Collection
- The Olio - Amherst's annual yearbook
- The Octagon - Amherst's open access repository 2013-2020
Digital Production
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DIWS maintains a digital production studio and uses advanced imaging techniques to provide access to materials from the Archives & Special Collections for inclusion in ACDC. We also advise the Amherst community on various imaging projects, and occasionally digitize archival material to support classroom and research projects, as capacity allows.
In digitizing materials, we follow the Federal Agencies Guidelines Initiative Technical Guidelines for Digitizing Cultural Heritage Materials, which are the same standards met by the Library of Congress.
Digitization Projects & Highlights
- Frost Finds Instagram- digital storytelling, curated and shared in collaboration with Amherst students
- Photogrammetry Course offered in collaboration with the Beneski Museum, 2020
- Scanning the Past: Preserving Amherst's History, Digitally, 2017
Digital Preservation
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DIWS partners with the Archives & Special Collections to ensure long-term, sustainable access to the digital content produced by the Library and the College.
Current Digital Preservation Efforts
- Implementing the Internet Archive's ArchiveIt for archiving Amherst College websites
- Developing strategies for digitally preserving born-digital content and legacy media
- Consulting with campus cultural heritage departments (museums and centers) on digital preservation strategies for their collections
- Building connections and improving communication across campus about data and records management
Library Web Services
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DIWS manages the Library’s web presence across our various platforms, and collaborates with the Library's User Experience Strategist to provide optimal usability and accessibility for all our digital services.
Featured Library Sites
- Main Library website
- Research Guides
- ArchivesSpace
- The Consecrated Eminence - Archives & Special Collections Blog
- Racial History of Amherst College
- Native American Literary Atlas
Standards, Policies & Strategy
DIWS adheres to national and international community-based standards and best practices in managing the Library’s digital collections. Our goal is to provide digital collections to as wide an audience as possible, in keeping with our Amherst College Library Digital Content Strategy and Digital Collection Development Policy for archival and special collections materials.
Digital Scholarship Summer Fellowship
From 2014-2020, staff in DIWS and across the Library ran the Digital Scholarship Summer Fellowship, an 8-12 week program that immersed a small cohort of students in digital scholarship and digital humanities theory and practice, giving them the tools to build a collaborative DH project based around a collection from the Archives and Special Collections. Though the fellowship program has ended, the syllabus for the fellowship is still available as a resource for others.