 Digital History Collections Tutorial This tutorial guides users in utilizing the digital history collections to search for and use digital objects housed in the collections. It covers an intro to the digital history collections, so what's there? Searching instructions and navigation Utilizing and understanding digital objects as well as digital object records Introduction What are the digital history collections and what's digitized? The digital history collections house digital copies of select materials from USU's archival holdings, including things like photographs, diaries, letters, oral histories, rare books, and even some things like medieval manuscripts. It isn't a catalog of all of the libraries or special collections holdings, but a collection of digital objects. When looking for digital copies of materials from USU's special collections and archives, your primary resource will be the digital history collections site, digital.lib.usu.edu. There you can use the basic search tool on the bottom left-hand side of the header, or you can use the advanced search tool on the bottom right-hand side of the header. Basic versus advanced searches The basic search tool will search all the digital objects in the collection based on your search terms. The advanced search tool will let you filter by specific fields such as creator, date, or subject, and can allow you to narrow your search down by collection. For now, let's operate using the basic search on the home page. Below your search bar will be a featured collection section, highlighting some of the unique holdings or noteworthy collections. Below are all of the collections in alphabetical order. You can click on each collection to navigate to that collection's specific landing page. There you can read a brief description of the collection, and from there can view all of the digital objects in that collection by clicking the Enter the Collection button. Searching and using specific collections Sometimes your research interests will lead you to a specific collection, or you will already have a particular collection in mind that you want to search. Let's use the Becker Brewing Company collection as an example. Find this collection in the alphabetical list on the Digital History Collections homepage. Some of the collections will already have some useful, pre-generated selections of similar digital objects. This collection, for example, has a link where you can find all of the compiled correspondence. By clicking on the link, you can view all of the digitized letters from the collection. These lists can be a good overview of what is housed in the collection, though not all collections will have curated lists such as these, and these lists are not always exhaustive. Navigating Landing Pages Now let's click Enter the Collection. The page should say, Browsing items in Becker Brewing and Malting Company records near the top. Just below that, you'll see that there are 168 records in this collection, meaning that there are 168 digital objects. These include anything from letters and newspaper clippings, to ads and corporate records, to pictures of various bottles used by the Brewing Company. The list of digital objects sorts alphabetically. Let's click on the first one. A newspaper article entitled, Becker compares Utah with California, cites danger of prohibition, 1914. The first portion of this page is a scan of the article itself. To view the object in full, select View All Pages at the top of the item. A viewer with various controls, such as Zoom, Print and Save, will appear on the screen and will allow you to view the digital object in greater clarity. Images may be downloaded for student projects as long as you provide a credit. Courtesy of USU Special Collections, Merrill-Cazare Library. For other projects or to obtain a high-resolution scan, please contact Special Collections staff. Exiting out of the viewer, using the X in the top right-hand corner and returning to the previous page, scroll down. Below the digital object will be the item description. This section includes all of the metadata, which is the information about the item. It will give you title, a description or summary of the object, and other useful information, such as dates and time periods, the archival source or call number, and various information you might need for citing the object in your research.