An access point. A touch stone. A portal. This is what a library is; it’s a place of accessibility. When people come to a library, they expect to find a place where they can reach resources and multi-media that will allow them to learn, to educate, to create, to grow, to entertain, and to expand their imaginations.
At the Mary and Jeff Bell Library, this is an ever evolving and continual process to improving accessibility. A huge part of this is not only increasing physical access, it is moving more media into the digital realm and increasing access online. Digitization is the goal that Special Collections & Archives at TAMU-CC strives for when processing the collections that it houses. Increasing the availability of history all along the spectrum from the 1800’s to the 1950’s to just last year in our COVID-19 Archive (We’d love for you to share your experience so that we can see the pandemic through your lens. You can still make submissions!) is something that we work on every day.
Currently, we have the privilege to undertake a huge project made possible through grant funding. One of our large collections spanning generations of a founding Corpus Christi family is the Charles F. H. von Blucher Family Papers and we are working to process and organize the collection in preparation to take the next steps towards digitization. This project’s funding was awarded to the Bell Library’s Special Collections and Archives department through the U. S. Institute of Museum and Library Services to Texas State Library and Archives Commission’s TexTreasures Grant for the fiscal year 2020 through 2021 (Grant #TXT-21011). We are working with a graduate assistant, Andrew Karnes, to organize, process, and relocate the collection to make it physically accessible. We have recently applied for funding for the next fiscal year to continue in the next steps of digitizing this large and bountiful collection. The diversity of media and the years of knowledge held in the Blucher Collection make its accessibility both physically and digitally an important portal for people to walk through and learn. The Blucher family played an important part in building a foundation for Corpus Christi and we look forward to building a foundation for your research through our processing of this collection and many more in the future!
