Fall 2007 Project

This semester’s project is actually a combination of two different projects: Iowa Railroad Depots Digital Collection and Iowa Civil War Diaries Collection. The Railroad Depots project is associated with a massive collection of railroad materials that make up the John P. Vander Maas Railroadiana Collection, which lives in the Special Collections Department of the U. of Iowa library. A lot of photographs in the collection have been digitized and are available on the Web through the Iowa Heritage Digital Collection (IHDC). The portion of the collection that I work with for this project is the pictures of railroad depots. The goal is to create a website that displays a 1915 railroad map, and when users click on towns along the railroad lines, pictures of that town’s depot will pop up.

The Iowa Civil War Diaries Collection is in a much earlier phase than the Railroadiana Collection. There are currently only a few diaries that have been digitized and are available online. The goal of this project is to survey the diaries located in Special Collections and Iowa Women’s Archives and develop an online collection.