The Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Digital Suite is the capstone achievement of many dedicated individuals collaborating, in true team effort, to unify access to all of the Law School Library’s extraordinary collections of Holmes material.
First and foremost, we are grateful to Norman B. Tomlinson (J.D. 1951) for providing generous funding to the initiatives to digitize the collections and to build the platform to deliver this Suite as an open and useful online venue for learning, research, and teaching.
Ed Moloy and Margaret Peachy of the Library’s Historical & Special Collections unit arranged and processed the historic collections, produced finding aids and other key metadata for the Suite, and served on the team to define requirements for technology and web design.
The Library’s Digital Lab staff coordinated digitization activities for the nearly 2,400 items in the five Holmes related manuscript collections and developed the Suite’s open-source 3D (Discovery and Delivery of Digital collections) technology platform.
Steve Chapman provided administrative oversight and managed workflows; Andy Silva designed and developed 3D, including tools to produce and aggregate metadata; and Lindsay Dumas oversaw the quality control program and produced the majority of the thousands of tags that simplify finding materials by document type, date, name, and location.
Craig Smith, former Digital Projects Assistant, prepared over 2,000 manuscript items for digitization. Eldra Walker worked in the final phase of the project to tag hundreds of digital objects.
Mindy Spitzer Johnston, former Curator of Digital and Visual Resources, and Craig Smith cataloged and managed the digitization project of the 75 objects and nearly 1,000 images in the Suite, as well as the scrapbook and correspondence documenting Holmes’s Civil War experience.
Skilled technicians in Harvard Library’s Imaging Services photographed all materials, processed page images to produce searchable text, and deposited well-structured objects to the Harvard Library’s Digital Repository Service.
Nicholas Cochrane and Malisa Kuch of SwissFish designed the web site and built key components of the Suite’s browse functions.
The Library’s senior administrators championed the idea to unify and broaden access to the Holmes collections, and provided leadership and key resources for each project in building the Suite. Special thanks to John G. Palfrey Jr., former Henry N. Ess III Professor of Law and Vice Dean for Library and Information Resources at Harvard Law School; also to Kim Dulin, Co-Director, Harvard Library Innovation Lab and Associate Director for Collection Development and Digital Initiatives; and Suzanne Wones, Acting Executive Director.