When you make an Annual Fund gift to the Newberry, you support everything we do, from staff to acquisitions to programming, and even building maintenance. Each Donor Digest, we highlight one aspect of the Newberry that your donation helps enable. For National Library Week, we’re pleased to highlight Digital Initiatives and Services, or DIS.
Headed by Director Jennifer Thom Dalzin, the DIS team consists of nine full-time staff dedicated to maintaining ever-greater digital access to the Newberry’s broad collections. Headquartered at collections.newberry.org and its partner websites and viewable worldwide, DIS helps every other department at the Newberry expand its reach.
“What’s great about the Newberry is our accessibility,” says Jen Wolfe, Digital Scholarship and Outreach Librarian. DIS prides itself on the significant amount of collection materials available online – everything from maps to dance performance footage to over 40,000 postcards – and in the highest quality possible. This makes the Newberry’s digital materials priceless to researchers, both expert and amateur. “It’s about expanding the audience and expanding the reach of the Newberry,” says Wolfe.
The team, like the Newberry entire, believes deeply in the twin pillars of community and access when it plans its initiatives. One that Wolfe wants more users to know about is Newberry Transcribe, a vast project that invites users to help DIS staff make collections more searchable and useful by transcribing handwritten material from letters, diaries, documents, and more. “It’s part and parcel with the Newberry’s commitment to community, to growing users’ engagement with both our collections and their own curiosity,” says Wolfe.
The Annual Fund supports nearly every aspect of DIS’s work, from staff to servers to the oftentimes laborious work of digitizing materials in the first place. Here’s a primer on some of the projects that your gift unlocks for DIS:
A gift of $50 allows staff to produce digital images of 20 postcards and add them to Postcard Tag, a popular website where visitors around the globe add subject tags and transcribe text from postcards in the Newberry collection;
A gift of $100 enables imaging for a roll of 50 Pullman car drawings for a soon-to-be-released crowdsourcing website where train enthusiasts can find and transcribe important plan numbers, technical details, and dates;
A gift of $250 funds the support staff work required to add a small collection of images (like these lantern slides documenting the daily life of African Americans during the early years of the Great Migration) to our digital collection; larger gifts support the processing of more complex projects, like uploading a batch of Civil War letters from Colonel Robert R. Livingston, 1st Nebraska Cavalry, to Newberry Transcribe, assisting volunteers with their transcription and review, and adding the letters and transcripts to our digital collection.
This story is part of the Newberry’s Donor Digest, Spring 2025. In this newsletter, we share with donors exciting stories of the work made possible by their generosity. Learn more about supporting the library and its programs.