The Farm, Field, and Fireside collection is a newly created and extensive digital archive of farm newspapers published in the Midwest from the mid-nineteenth century through the 1940s and 1950s. The wide array of publications in the collection--ranging from the hog farmer's Berkshire Stockman to the women's publication The Farmer's Wife --are an invaluable source of primary research materials and they offer a fascinating perspective on historical issues during a pivotal period of economic, social, and political growth in the United States.
The Farm, Field, and Fireside Collection is a stellar example of a digital library created to preserve a library's archived materials, and it employed digital tools for information organization, such as metadata to organize the collection and make it user accessible. The Farm, Field, and Fireside collection also is deeply immersed in the technologies of remembrance and forgetting, as it seeks to unearth and preserve a core part of Midwestern history.
This poster will discuss the creation and maintenance of the Farm, Field, and Fireside digital newspaper archive, and examine the intent behind its creation for both the University of Illinois faculty, students, and staff, and scholarly communities at-large. The poster will explore: What research and information resources needs are addressed by the Farm, Field, and Fireside Collection? What was the most effective way of organizing the resources for students and researchers to use?
The poster will also review the topical web research guides that were created to support research done with the Farm, Field, and Fireside collection. This part of the poster will examine questions such as: What was the most effective and efficient format for delivering the research guides? How could we utilize the guides to connect the digital newspaper archive to the Library's other subject and special collections? What type of background content was needed in the research guides in order to present the collection's items as viable sources for research? The poster session will explain how we addressed these issues in the maintenance and enhancement of the digital newspaper archive with Olive ActivePaper Librarian software, the Library's promotion of the collection to interested communities, and the process of creating web research guides to cement the Collection's interdisciplinary connections to the Library's other print and digital collections. This poster will offer an intriguing examination of a new and wholly unique digital archive that is a valuable resource for historians, digital humanists, student scholars, librarians, and the general public at large
