![]() When a file is added to the Internet Archive, an OCR’d text is automatically created. The way modern users expect to find such information is via full-text search. There was no index for the other collections. However the index was cumbersome to use and only covered materials through 2004. Previously, the only way to find such material was to consult the Bullet Index, a detailed subject index first on cards and later online as a series of PDFs. Looking back at our records of reference questions, the most frequent request was to find all mentions of a specific person, event, building, or UMW tradition: be it alumni looking for articles about themselves or that they wrote when they were on the Bullet staff, family members in search of their mother’s yearbook photo, researchers trying to find information about the construction of the amphitheatre, or students looking for pictures of Devil-Goat Day festivities long past. Moreover, although Lyrasis and the Internet Archive allowed us to digitize and make available collections that we would never have been able to host on our own, they did not do so in a way that allowed our patrons to accomplish what they most wanted from an online archive. However, it is equally possible that users affiliated with UMW, students, faculty, and alumni, failed to find the collections at all: collections that should have have been highly relevant to them. It is possible that our patrons were able to find the collections through other means: through Google perhaps or by going directly to. The Bullet newspaper was the most popular at 64 times, and the Aubade literary magazine, the least, at only 6. In a five month period from July 2014-November 2014 (during which there were almost 44,000 views), links from the Libraries’ website to one of the Internet Archive collections were clicked 160 times. ![]() What is clear from looking at the Libraries’ statistics is that most usage did not originate from the Libraries’ website. Some of the spikes in usage correlate with times the Libraries were adding to the collection or doing maintenance, and surely represent library staff use. It is difficult to say anything definitive about who these users are. Usage has increased steadily since January 2011, totaling nearly 350,000 views. UMW’s content is all held within the University of Mary Washington collection, so therefore it is possible to see views per month for the entire collection. The Internet Archive does not offer detailed usage statistics, but it does provide number of views per day per item. Over the course of the next four years, these collections were added to the Internet Archive, with the final issues of the Bullet uploaded in the spring of 2014. Together they comprise some two thousand documents and a century of UMW history. UMW digitized five collections through the MDC: academic course catalogs from 1913-2013, the alumni magazine, 1939-2011, the Aubade literary magazine, 1971-2010, the Battlefield Yearbook, 1913-2010, and the Bullet student newspaper, 1922-2010. Lyrasis partnered with the Internet Archive to host digitized materials so that they would be accessible to users all over the world. Sloan Foundation that helped libraries complete digitization projects that they would not have had the resources to accomplish on their own. ![]() In 2010, the University of Mary Washington participated in the Lyrasis Mass Digitization Collaborative (MDC), an initiative partially funded by the Alfred P. ![]()
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