The Upper Midwest Digital Collections Conference (#umdcc25) and the Minnesota Digital Library Annual Meeting (#mndiglib25) will be held jointly on May 6–7, 2025. It will be an in-person event held in Saint Paul, Minnesota at the Union Depot.
In 1844, a man named William Miller predicted the end of the world. When the apocalypse didn’t come, he and his devoted followers were left reeling. However, out of their great disappointment came several new American Protestant churches that still operate today. This presentation outlines a collaboration between Aurora University in Illinois and Andrews University in Michigan to digitize, preserve, and share the personal papers of William Miller and other key Adventist leaders whose writings shed light on this interesting moment in American religious history. Aurora University, a former Advent Christian school, has historically valuable but disorganized and inaccessible special collections. Andrews University, affiliated with the Seventh-day Adventist denomination, has a robust library digitization program and an open-source repository built with Samvera Hyku. Despite having no prior collaboration, this partnership benefits both universities. Aurora gains help in organizing and providing access to their collection, while Andrews gains valuable materials to share through their repository. This presentation will describe how we drafted a partnership agreement, the workflows we established to fulfill this project (including training AI-powered transcription software for handwritten documents), a timeline of our accomplishments so far, the challenges we've faced, and next steps.
