University of Vermont Libraries' Center for Digital Initiatives

Meet Our Fall 2010 Students

Elias Baldwin

Elias is a senior studying history who is currently doing a service-learning internship in the CDI. He is working on the forthcoming collection Photographs of Vergennes, Vermont which will launch in May 2011. The collection is a partnership which he arranged with the Bixby Memorial Free Library in Vergennes.

Elias is digitizing historical slides of Vergennes on our slide scanner and is creating the metadata which will describe each photo. Elias grew up in Vergennes and enjoys looking through photographs of his hometown. He says he finds it neat to see how people used to look 150 years ago. In Elias’s free time he works on rebuilding a mini bike that has a gas engine.

Alexander Hayssen

Ax is a second semester junior majoring in history with minors in Chinese and speech. As part of his History internship, Ax is scanning and transcribing Horace Barlow’s Civil War diary which will be part of the forthcoming Vermonters in Civil War Collection (launching April 2011). Ax and Horace Barlow are both members of the Sigma Phi Society. Ax enjoys his work at the CDI because he gets to read about a fellow brother’s notes and thoughts on fighting the war. Ax is particularly interested in the Civil War, and and enjoys reading a primary source and making it available for future research.

No one outside the Sigma Phi Society has ever been able to read Horace Barlow's diary before, so it’s exciting for Ax to help create this collection. Ax is reading about someone who went to the same school, was in the same fraternity, and is the same age (22). He finds it interesting to relate to someone in such a different generation while he sits and types Barlow’s story on a computer. A passage that Ax found enjoyed was when Barlow talks about George Grenville Benedict who won the medal of honor at Gettysburg.

Megan Resnick

Megan is a junior studying Molecular Genetics and is a student worker in the CDI. She is currently working on transcribing letters for the forthcoming Vermonters in Civil War Collection.

Megan not only enjoys working at the CDI to get a break from her studies but also to learn about the daily lives of the writers and how they communicated with their loved ones. She finds it entertaining how formal they are in their language. In Megan’s free time she likes to ski, rock climb, and dance.

Joanna Riley

Joanna is a first year grad student in the doctorate of physical therapy program. She is the student outreach worker at the CDI. She does a mixture of sending emails, hanging up flyers, and spreading the wealth of information that the CDI has to offer UVM and the local Vermont community. From promoting new collections or upcoming events to writing this post, Joanna helps reach out to CDI users.

Joanna writes items of the month, edits live and in-process collections, and assists with collection launches. Joanna says she enjoys working at the CDI because the people are great, she has learned a lot of new skills about web publishing and copywriting, and because she has been introduced to the plethora of resources the library has to offer. In Joanna’s free time she enjoys playing ice hockey, attending yoga classes, and snowboarding.

Check out Tennie Toussaint Photographs with images of Burlington Streets covered with snow and towns people ready with their shovels and plows! You will also see pictures of Lake Champlain frozen for the winter.

View more pictures of Vermonts winter wonderland here!.

We are pleased to announce the launch of the Porter C. Thayer Photographs collection.

The collection will contain 1300 photographs of Windham County made from silver gelatin prints by this early 20th century itinerant town photographer. The prints were made in 1980 from the 5×7 glass plates negatives held at the Brooks Memorial Library in Brattleboro, Vermont.

“During the time period Porter worked, Vermont was extremely poor and rural, yet held a close-knit population that shared the labors of life. Farmers helped one another to survive in a subsistence and barter economy. For women, men, and children, life meant constant work. Thayer’s images describe the work and the tools involved. His landscape images reveal this working landscape, which today is mostly hidden by trees.” (by Jessica Weitz and Forrest Holzapfel)

This collection is being digitized through a collaboration between the UVM Libraries’ Center for Digital Initiatives and the Brooks Memorial Library. The collection will launch with 100 initial photos in early December, after which batches of 50 images will be added to the collection on a continuous basis. This work is supported in part by a grant from the Windham Foundation.

Read more about this collection in a recent article from The Commons News.

Please join us for an afternoon talk about “The History of the Town Photographer” by local photographer Forrest Holzapfel, sponsored by the Vermont Humanities Council, and a discussion of the Porter Thayer project to date, on January 15th at 3:00 PM in the Brooks Memorial Library’s meeting room. Brooks Memorial Library, 224 Main Street, Brattleboro, VT 05301.