This collection contains family papers and personal correspondences of Eleanor (“Ellie”) Mary Sherman Thackara, daughter of Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman, and Alexander Montgomery (“Mont”) Thackera from 1854 to 1897. It includes, among other information, descriptions of Mont’s service in the Navy in the 1870s, daily life in Eastern Pennsylvania and the Main Line during the latter half of the 19th century, Abraham Lincoln’s funeral procession, and Ellie and Mont’s courtship.
Collection Principles and Organization
The digital collection includes the entirety of the physical collection, including 2115 documents. The Sherman Thackara Collection was donated to Villanova University by Eleanor Sherman Thackara in 1897, and thus represents her decisions regarding what information about her family would be interesting and appropriate to share with the public, rather than any particular collecting policy on the part of the university. The collection is accessible through two points of entry: the digital library search page and a separate finding aid. The digital library page allows for both browsing and searching by keyword, title, author, date, or publisher. The finding aid presents the documents as they are in the physical collection: boxes are arranged thematically, with correspondence grouped by author and recipient, and within folders documents are arranged in chronological order. The finding aid does link directly to the digitized documents.
Object Characteristics
The majority of documents in this collection are handwritten letters of correspondence between various members of the family. Other types of documents include photographs, receipts and business letters, a diary, some books, newspaper clippings, and family documents. Unfortunately, the text of these documents is not searchable – no OCR coding has been done and no separate transcripts are available. This means deciphering handwriting and, in some cases, is further complicated when both sides of the paper were written on and ink bled through from one side to the other. Some zooming capability is available, but it’s rather awkward. As far as I could tell, you could either look at the document filling the screen or zoom in all the way – there is no intermediate level of zoom. For letters, the zoomed in view allows only 2-10 words on the screen at a time, making it even more difficult to read actual texts. All of the images appear to be jpegs.
Metadata
For each document, a separate “details” tab provides metadata including a document identifier, permanent link, date, creator, publisher, subjects, and source. These fields are common across all collections in the Villanova University Digital Library and contain much more complete information in this collection than some of the other collections. Interestingly, the metadata available in the “details” tab refers to a “creator” of each document, while the search tabs looks for an “author” – presumably the term creator is meant to comply with Dublin Core or other standards while the term author is deemed more understandable to the user. Another interesting quirk of the way the metadata is presented is that the document identifier, which includes box/folder/document number and call number for the collection as a whole, is not labeled but simply appears as a header for the rest of the metadata. So it is possible for users to identify a document from the digital collection and find it in the physical collection, but only if they recognize a number like “7/3/18 OM E467.S53” for what it is.
Intended Audience
The intended audience of this collection is presumably the Villanova University community of students, faculty, and staff. For the casually interested user, I think the digital collection contains a lot of interesting information to browse and could be a great hook for users to become aware of the physical collection. As a scholarly resource, however, it falls short, due to the inability for full-text searching and constrained zoom capabilities described above.
No comments:
Post a Comment