Building Digital Archives Collections at Northern Virginia Community College

Abstract

Done well, a digital collection should tell the story of thematically similar cultural objects... . e might not think of community colleges in Virginia as institutions with deep historical roots. The Virginia Assembly established the Virginia Community College System (VCCS) in 1966 in order to fill the need for two-year college programs in the state. The fiftieth anniversary of VCCS will arrive in 2016, and that event suggests an opportunity to look back at the history of community colleges in Virginia. At the Alexandria Campus of Northern Virginia Community College, we have already begun this process by developing a digital collection to house and display historical documents from our campus archives. We have identified student publications, meeting minutes, event programs, and photographs as candidates for digitization. In “Defining Collections in Distributed Digital Libraries,” Carl Lagoze and David Fielding define a collection as a “set of criteria for selecting resources from the broader information space.”1 Essentially, collections are sets of items that meet some specific criteria of provenance and pertinence. They are commonly found in libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural institutions. Digital collections take the concept and apply it to images of items on the Web. Those items might include printed text documents, printed images, video, and audio. They might also include born-digital items. Digital collections aim to extend the reach of these items beyond their permanent homes in an archive to anyone with Internet access. Digital collections make it possible to display items online that might not get as much exposure in their