Digital Collections Unit
Pet Photography through the Ages
Our cultural obsession with cute animal photos might seem like a recent phenomenon that has flourished with sites like Cute Overload and icanhascheezburger, but photographing our pets is as old a practice as photography itself. Many of the Bancroft’s collections, from the Oliver Family Photograph Collections to California Faces: Selections from The Bancroft Library Portrait Collection include photographs of everyday-life moments that look familiar to the modern pet owner, such as posing with a beloved collie or cat. Click on the links below to explore the collections to which these images belong.
[slideshow]
- Dog.
- Anita? Oliver with dog.
- A Boy and His Dog. Los Angeles, California
- Our Police Dog on Nov. 4/24 Election Day.
- Engineer Frank Crockett and his dog
- [Phelan, girl, and dogs]
- [Dog in carriage]
- Dog owned by Sheldon Nichols
- Group portrait of men with dogs, University of California at Berkeley, Summer School of Surveying.
- [Unidentified man with dog.]
- Dog, Pekinese, named “Jet”, owned by J.P. Smith.
- Anita Oliver and dog, Ginger.
- [Woman with parrot]
- Two cats
- [Cat. Unidentified location.]
- Miss Coolbrith with cat, 1924. 56 Tarabal St., S.F.
Announcing The Bancroft Library’s New Online Companion Exhibits!
The Bancroft Library is pleased to announce the launch of a new online companion exhibit to the exhibition A Place at the Table, which opened today in The Bancroft Library Gallery. A Place at the Table celebrates the life and art of the LGBT community through text, image and voice. The development of this new online companion exhibit is part of an initiative spearheaded by the Bancroft Exhibition Committee to ensure an online component for all of The Bancroft Library’s rich physical exhibitions.
With the support of the Bancroft Exhibition Committee and working closely in with the curators of the exhibition, the Digital Collections Unit of The Bancroft Library developed this first online exhibit using Omeka, an open source web-publishing platform. Omeka is a project of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, and is supported by UC Berkeley’s Library Applications and Publishing group. It allows libraries to upload digital collections and create complex and visually interesting exhibits. The A Place at the Table exhibit marks the first of many online companion exhibits by The Bancroft Library. We hope you enjoy them!
Visit the online companion exhibit to A Place at the Table:
http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/omeka/exhibits/show/aplaceatthetable
The Digital Collections Unit Blog!
Welcome to our new blog! The Digital Collections Unit (DCU) at The Bancroft Library handles all things digital at Bancroft. We created this blog to share some of the interesting work we do here in the DCU. We hope you’ll find our work as exciting as we do!
About the Digital Collections Unit at Bancroft
The Digital Collection Unit (DCU) of The Bancroft Library is responsible for creating and maintaining our online collections. While this initially encompassed creation of digital versions of our collection materials, it has now grown to include management of incoming born-digital materials and electronic records. The DCU provides digital services, management, preservation and access to digital collections from the Bancroft.
The DCU is also responsible for the encoding and maintenance of our electronic finding aids and archival collection information management systems, metadata, and tools. We work closely with the Library Systems Office to support our digital initiatives and technology needs. We work closely with the California Digital Library (the digital library for UC) to present our digital collections online and preserve them long-term.
DCU staff are also Bancroft’s social media team. They are tasked with posting the daily updates to Facebook and Twitter, and now maintaining this blog.
We are also embarking on an effort to provide more focused digital support services to our campus researchers involved in digital research and digital humanities endeavors. With over 15 year experience in digital initiatives, we are excited to share our expertise with our campus colleagues and build new research resources.
So, we hope you will check in once in a while for our new posts on what is happening — digitally and otherwise — in DCU. There certainly is never a dull moment around here!