Sorority & Fraternity FAQ

Building a digital archive involves three key steps: strategy, preservation quality imaging, and meticulous tagging. All of the packages contain these steps, to varying degrees. HistoryIT will review your archival holdings – either remotely via questionnaires and video conference or onsite. Some portion of your historical materials will be transferred to a HistoryIT Digital Preservation Lab for conversion into archival quality master files. This assures true digital preservation for generations to come. We will then rehouse all of the materials in archive-safe housing, so that the physical artifacts are preserved as well. HistoryIT will either transport the organized archives back to the sorority, fraternity, chapter, or work with representatives to add the archival materials to a college, university or other local archive to care for their long-term preservation.

HistoryIT will set up an account for your digital archive in Odyssey™, our digital archive management platform. Our metadata professionals will ingest all newly digitized materials into your digital archive, complete with detailed descriptions and subject, chapter, event, location, and era tags. Every identified person will be tagged. If an organization’s national or international headquarters already manages a digital archive on HistoryIT’s platform, a digital chapter museum’s items can fully integrate with the rest of the organizational digital archive. In either case, a digital chapter museum will maintain a separate digital archive that presents collections (or the unrestricted items in it). Each package contains different add-on features to the digital history sites.

All packages produce a report, guide and/or plan for growing and maintaining your digital archive.

The Professional and Comprehensive Preservation & Digital Chapter Museum Packages allow for a HistoryIT expert to work closely with your physical archive and meet with interested parties in person. While on site, the expert will review any materials already organized into some sort of storage space. They will meet with collegiate members and alumni to discuss historical materials and where else locally they may be hiding. A portion, or in some cases all, of your archive will be transported to a HistoryIT Digital Preservation Lab for conversion into archival quality master files. This assures true digital preservation for generations to come. We will then rehouse all of the materials in archive-safe housing, so that the physical artifacts are preserved as well. HistoryIT will either transport the organized archives back to the chapter or work with representatives to add the archival materials to a college, university or other local archive to care for their long-term preservation.

In collaboration with chapter and alumni representatives, HistoryIT will also reach out to all chapter alumni with a call to share any materials they may be holding. These materials will be returned to individual donors should they wish. Alternatively, they will be housed along with the chapter archive.

If your archive’s size exceeds the specification of your package level, HistoryIT will provide a detailed plan to add the remaining items in future phases.

Creating a digital archive involves far more than simply scanning or photographing material. When undergoing digital preservation, quality imaging is critical. Specific guidelines must be followed in order to generate high resolution images that meet certain light color, and focus specifications. The goal of digital preservation imaging is to produce a file that is as close a replica of the original artifact as is possible to create.

Once the imaging stage is complete, actual digitization begins. To make your digital collection meaningful, people must be able to find and navigate your digital records. This requires creating searchable information that describes each image. Without this important, but involved step, you simply have a haystack of digital needles. HistoryIT tags every single person in the digital archive, as well as provides tags for subjects, events, locations and eras. Our approach allows online visitors to find linkages among the items, and easily view or read the digitized original item.

Yes. An annual fee is required for your digital archive software license, which allows you to access, manage, expand and share digital artifacts. Depending on the selected package, this fee is $500, $800 or $1,000 per year. Multi-year licenses for a discount are available.

These packages are for digital preservation projects, as well as online digital histories. Building a digital archive with digital preservation files provides security into the future. We need to create all digital items at the same high standard in order to fully preserve them for the future. Once the items have been imaged, HistoryIT – or your volunteers – must create all of the descriptive metadata and tags in a consistent manner as the rest of the collection.

Adopting a digital preservation strategy involves building a digital archive that will stand the test of time, rather than quickly creating digital items and data to post or share online. Over time, standards will change. Web browsers will make certain media formats obsolete. Thus, when we undertake digital imaging, it is necessary to image at resolutions far greater than we would plan on using at present. This allows us to easily transform those higher resolution digital artifacts into new web formats in the future. If you were to quickly scan images on a desktop scanner and post several JPGs online, for example, it is likely that those images will not be viewable in a few years when web standards change. You would thus have to re-scan those images.

If we fail to take this approach, we are embracing a strategy that produces a fun novelty in the present, but does not retain its value over time.

Just because you don’t have what you might envision as a formal archive, we promise you have history! And we will help you find it. A large portion of it is likely digital! In that case, the goal will be to compile various digital formats. All packages involve HistoryIT connecting with your organization’s representatives, in person or remotely, to gather any physical and digital items they have to include.

Yes and no. Most of HistoryIT’s process is the same for younger chapters. In fact, chapters formed in the past twenty years likely have more content than older ones. This is because most of the materials will be digital! HistoryIT will assess all that you have and build a digital archive that will showcase and connect your history to the rest of your organization’s. Most chapters established in 2000 or after, though, will likely be able to build their comprehensive digital archives with the Professional Digital Archive Package.

A number of our clients utilize grant funding to save their history. Fraternal Law Partners has created this guide to help you understand if and how you might qualify. Feel free to reach out to us with any questions at [email protected].