Wednesday, December 4, 2019

The Jeypore Portfolio of Architectural Details



The next collection we want to highlight for you is our collection of the Jeypore Portfolio of Architectural Details. This collection of plates come to us from the UWM Libraries Special Collections.The Jeypore Portfolio of Architectural Details digital collections includes two of the twelve volumes from an original 1890-1913 publication compiled by Colonel S.S.Jacob of the Institution of Civil Engineers.

The volumes which we currently hold include Volume VII, volume IX, Dados, with a note on the process of fresco paintings in Jeypore and volume X, Parapets. The plates show prints of various architectural designs and motifs as well as brief introductions to the techniques used to create them. Only Volumes 9 and 10 are digitized and both are missing a range of plates from the whole.

The digital images were created using digital photography. They were digitized for use in a project for our Look Here! collaboration. To view the final products of the collaborations you can view our digital exhibition here.

To browse the Jeypore Portfolio check out our digital collection.

Friday, October 4, 2019

The Eldon Murray Papers


Hello everyone! It has certainly been a while since we posted. Seventeen months to be more precise and we are sorry for the radio silence. However, it’s not without good reason - we have been busy at work on some new collections! In the past year we have launched several new digital collections. In the next few weeks we’ll be taking some time to highlight a few of these new collections.

Eldon Murray in Korea, 1950-1953
The first collection we want to highlight is the Eldon Murray Papers. Eldon Murray was a prominent activist in the Milwaukee LGBT community. In addition to his work with the Gay Peoples Union (GPU) and the Milwaukee AIDS Project (MAP), Murray was the founder of SAGE/Milwaukee, the first organization in Wisconsin dedicated to serving the needs of older gay, lesbian, and bisexual people through community building and counseling services. Eldon also served in the United States Army in Korea. The collection contains photographs, organizational records, a few publications, and a collection of scrapbooks containing newspaper clipping dating from the 1940s-1970s.

Eldon Murray scrapbook page (redacted version)
The scrapbooks presented us with a unique challenge in terms of providing access to the collection. The pages contained many newspaper articles in their entirety, which made publishing them online a conundrum. Copyright laws and the sheer amount of material represented made it unfeasible for us to post them unaltered. In the end our solution was to run the scrapbooks through an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) program to generate a transcript. We hid this field from the public but still made it searchable, this way we can provide the information to our researchers without infringing upon copyright laws. This is a great example of one way in which we try to work through issues to provide as much access as we can to our researchers.

For those who would like to access the unedited versions of these articles and scrapbook pages - come to the UWM Archives reading room where you can page through the physical scrapbooks. In addition to that you will also have access to the correspondence which has not been digitized for privacy reasons.