Saturday, June 13, 2009

Golden Personalities: Rollins and Digital History


The summer is suppose to be a time of sitting lounging by the pool. Not so much for academics, I have been working on this project and that project since classes ended. As I mentioned before I am putting together the tenure review file. With that 90% done I have more time to spend on my summer collaborative research project. Rollins has a Student-Faculty Collaborative Research Program that take places every summer. This summer, I'm working with Wenxian Zhang, the head of Rollins archive on a project called Golden Personalities. Our goal is to create a web-based biographical listing of important early town settlers and College teachers, benefactors, and notables. The project is great example of digital history. Our students utilize the archive's resources to write these short profiles. Wenxian and the Olin Library Archive have been at the cutting edge of digitalization for years. Rollins has a extensive digital archive that provides photos and documents about the college, Winter Park, and wider region. This project will give us a chance to explore the lives of a diverse group, including African-Americans that current students, faculty, and staff have little knowledge. So far, the project has been going well. Students have completed profiles on subjects such as , Gus C. Henderson, Franklin Fairbanks, Loring Chase, Charles H. Morse and Alonzo W. Rollins to name a few. Overall, I think we will cover more than 70 individual from the early history of Rollins College and Winter Park. As always, work in the archive reveals thing you didn't expect. I think this project will be learning process for everyone.

MORE TO COME..........