Democratizing Access to Ephemera at Princeton University Library

Librarians have long recognized the importance of collecting ephemera for documenting the ongoing processes of socio-political and cultural change. However, the complexities of acquiring, processing, and making ephemeral materials accessible and discoverable present significant challenges for most research libraries and inhibit developing such collections in broad and systematic ways. At Princeton University Library, the need to make accessible its vast and continuously growing Latin American Ephemera Collection induced the development of a new model for processing, item-level description, digitization, and discovery of ephemeral collections. As a result of close collaboration among colleagues from Collection Development, Cataloging & Metadata, and IT departmental units, new workflows and a new digital repository (Figgy) were developed as the foundation of an extensible, scalable, and sustainable model to make digitized ephemera freely and openly available to researchers. This session will discuss the origins of digital ephemera collections at Princeton, as well as how the addition of new collections, such as the South Asian Ephemera Collection, have inspired enhancements to the Figgy digital repository and the Digital Princeton University Library that include adjustments to the associated workflows for item-level description and opportunities to encourage collaboration with external partners.

Digital Archive of Latin American and Caribbean Ephemera: https://lae.princeton.edu/
South Asian Ephemera: https://dpul.princeton.edu/sae
Dissidents and Activists in Sri Lanka, 1960s to 1990s: https://dpul.princeton.edu/sae_sri_lanka_dissidents

Presentation