Samvera Connect 2023

This talk will recount highlights of institutional collaboration at Lafayette College around the East Asia Image Collection (EAIC), a digital repository that was launched as a CONTENTdm collection in November 2007. Over the past decade and a half, the EAIC has continued to be re-imagined, augmented, and upgraded through a process of collaboration between administrators, developers, cataloging experts, image-capture specialists, student assistants, donors, and academic historians. The project started small in 2002 with the acquisition of 341 picture postcards from colonial Taiwan. Currently, it hosts 7,152 digital surrogates of documents in many formats, and is used by teachers, students, and researchers of East Asian history and society throughout the world. This presentation focuses on how academic subject specialists, library-based digital scholarship teams, and the broad global community of curious people can all reap practical and intangible benefits from digital-repository construction, benefits that are unique to the medium itself.

Paul D. Barclay is Professor of History at Lafayette College, where he teaches East Asian, world, and local history, in addition to historical methods. He is the general editor of the East Asia Image Collection and author of Kondo the Barbarian: A Japanese Adventurer and Indigenous Taiwan’s Bloodiest Uprising (Camphor Press, 2023) and Outcasts of Empire: Japanese Rule on Taiwan's "Savage Border" 1874-1945 (University of California Press, 2018). Barclay’s research has received support from the National Endowment from the Humanities, the Social Science Research Council, the Japanese Council for the Promotion of Science, and the Taiwan Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He received his B.S. in Secondary Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Ph.D. in Japanese History at the University of Minnesota.