Reno Reporter

The University of Nevada, Reno, has released a guide on how to dig through their historical archives through their dataset.

The triumph of the first dataset in the digital archive encouraged teams working with similar collections to think big, a recent news release from the university said.

“In essence, we let machines read the documents for us,” Nathan Gerth, head of Digital Services, said in the release. “It then occurred to us that we could make the full set of text files available to users as a dataset, something that we were able to do in the digital archive.”

The archive brings up two types of content, such as texts from documents and transcripts from audio and video clips, the release said.

The portal showcases 13 collections that include information from GIS, text and science, including the recently digitized James Edward Church snow log books. 

Moreover, the portal is available on the school’s library website for staff and students. Individuals who are not associated with the school can access the collections by browsing the library's Digital Archive.

“We may think of the STEM disciplines as being solely forward thinking,” Tara Radniecki, head of DeLaMare Science and Engineering Library, said in the release. “But the ability to analyze historic data, such as Dr. Church's snow sampling records, or to add metadata ourselves to primary historical documents, like georeferencing regional maps, can help researchers better understand what has changed and how we can move forward using what we've learned.”