SMU Libraries Digital Collections Update: August 2022

In August 2022, SMU Libraries uploaded 188 items into SMU Libraries Digital Collections. Highlights include:

41 items, 1824-1973, from the Ridge Family Papers. These items include John Ridge’s 1835 journal while he was a Cherokee Nation delegate to Washington D.C. when the Cherokee Nation was in the process of ceding all Cherokee lands east of the Mississippi. Also included are letters from Arkansas, photographs, newspaper clippings, printed material, poetry by John Rollin Ridge, a leather pouch, and Elias Boudinott’s published An address to the whites.

7 interviews have been added to the Southern Methodist University Oral History Interviews and Digital Humanities Student Projects collection. These interviews, with Anaka Adams, Caeli Blake, Mandy Blankenship, Valeria Reynosa, Rumaldo Robles, Darian Taylor, and Joel Zapata are part of the Voices of SMU project.

33 items, ca. 1824-1919, from the new, online DeGolyer Library Cookbook Collection. In addition to recipes for various foods, drinks, and baked goods, there are recipes for a home remedy for a cold ”not in the head,” a formula for a quicklime mixture to kill worms in one’s lawn, and instructions for knitting.

69 course catalogs, 1961-1965 and 1967-1968, from the Southern Methodist University Course Catalogs collection. These catalogs contain general information and course descriptions from each of SMU’s programs of study during the 1960s.

42 photographs, ca. 1944-1945, from the John C. Cox  World War II Papers. These images show Cox’s time in a tropical area and include photographs of local markets and other buildings, landscapes and scenery, and photographs of Cox and his fellow soldiers.

Eleven issues of SMU’s Fondren Science Series, 1949-1970, are available in SMU Scholar. The Series ran in parallel with SMU’s Field & Laboratory journal and finally alongside SMU’s Journal of the Graduate Research Center. The Series coincided with the construction of the Fondren Science Building, which opened in 1950, and was then the largest building on campus and dedicated to the natural sciences. Unlike Field & Laboratory, Fondren Science Series published several much longer articles, but on an irregular schedule.

Other updates:

1684 photographic postcards from the John Miller Morris Collection are available online, thanks to a TexTreasures grant. These photographs capture a visual, documentary history of Texas as it pertains to locations from around the state, primarily ca. 1900-1925. This project was funded by a grant from the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services and Texas State Library and Archives Commission. SMU Libraries have received a follow-on grant to add approximately 1700 additional postcards in the coming year.

The Norwick Center for Digital Solutions’  Digital Collections Workflow and Metadata Guidelines, Version 5 are now available online. Last updated in 2018, the new version has been streamlined from 120 to 91 pages. Updates include information on procedures to make materials more accessible and critical cataloging for Authorized Subject Terms.