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.
Northwestern University Libraries holds one of the largest collections of Environmental Impact Studies in the US. Many of these documents are available on microfiche, and that fiche is sometimes our only version of the item in the collection. These reports are a trove of information about federal infrastructure projects, discuss the potential social and environmental effects of those projects, and often include public comments and sentiment.
Working with our Digital Scholarship colleagues and faculty members who wish to use these items for computational study, the Digital Products and Data Curation team has modified existing digital project workflows to digitize and provide access to these reports. This project required an examination of our existing workflows, proactive conversations between the digital projects staff, librarians, and researchers, and solutions for providing the content in both human- and machine-readable outputs.
This presentation provides a detailed case study of an on-going digitization project utilizing new processes and equipment as well as an overview of how Northwestern University Libraries Digital Products and Data Curation staff are thinking about the diverse ways that digital objects can be analyzed by researchers and how those use cases affect how we digitize, preserve and provide access to our resources.
