Library’s Rare Collections Accessible Electronically

Fondren Library users no longer have to make a trip to the library to view some of the rare sheet music, architectural drawings, photos, letters, articles, speeches, and other reference materials, thanks to the new Fondren Digital Collections.

The Fondren Digital Collections (FDC) houses high-quality digital files of original photographs, letters, drawings, rare publications, and other items presented in JPG, PDF, or other file formats that can be accessed on the Web. Sound files and other formats will be added soon.

The FDC currently features three collections, the largest of which is the William Ward Watkin Architecture Collection. Stored in the Woodson Research Center, this collection consists of the papers of William Ward Watkin, the first supervising architect of the Rice Institute and first chair of the Rice architecture department. More than 600 architectural drawings, photographs, items of correspondence, articles, and speeches are included in the collection, which dates from 1903 to 1956.

“This collection represents the physical birth of the Rice campus because Watkin was the architect who built the first buildings,” says Amanda Focke, archivist and special collections librarian at Fondren, who helped design and implement the FDC. “Because this collection is used heavily at Woodson, we chose it to represent the beginning of the Fondren Digital Collections as well.”

The other two collections consist of music from Fondren’s Brown Fine Arts Library. Both are underrepresented “gems” that haven’t been used much because many people are unaware of their existence, Focke says. One, the Illuminated Sacred Music Manuscript Collection, includes rare 15th- and 16th-century original southern European music manuscripts depicting religious hymns and songs in Latin, hand-drawn and beautifully illustrated with brilliant tempera paints on large vellum sheets.
The second is the Schumann Collection, which consists of original materials related to 19th-century German composer and music critic Robert Schumann, including a contemporary manuscript report of Schumann’s conducting at Düsseldorf.

The Fondren staff spent the past three years preparing the FDC, and each item has a description that includes the title, date of origin, creator, and details about the collection to which it belongs so the viewer can put it into context.

Now that the FDC is online at http://www.rice.edu/fondren/hyperion/, the information it contains is available not just to the Rice community but to scholars and researchers around the world. Some of the documents in the collection are full-text searchable; others are limited to keyword searches.

The Fondren Digital Resources Steering Committee, chaired by Geneva Henry, selects material for the FDC on the basis of known research interests, but also will include other less-known but valuable collections. Later this year, the committee plans to add the Rice Institute Pamphlet, an interdisciplinary scholarly journal published at Rice between 1915 and 1981. The journal features some of the most important speeches given on campus, and the digitization project will cover volumes 1 (1915) through 32/33 (1946). Suggestions for other materials to add to the FDC can be submitted to fondren-digital@rice.edu.

—B. J. Almond