PAGE 9 ANNUAL REPORT 2022–2023 - - - - - - 2 Advancing Research and Scholarship Library Digital Repository Work began upgrading “The Preserve,” the Lehigh Libraries’ unified digital repository platform, to better support preservation, curation, and sharing of digital special collections, faculty and student publications, and research data to make them accessible to the broader research community and the public, espe cially regarding compliance with external funding or other regulatory requirements related to data management, sharing, and open access. This re-envisioned archive will unify digitized col lections from Special Collections and Open Access faculty and student scholarship. The first phase of development includes an updated user interface and migration of all digital collections to the new system. Future local development phases will then focus on adding additional features to enhance collection discoverability, usability, research metrics, and to provide support for research datasets. Library Special Collections Special Collections received a number of gifts this year that expand the body of primary source collec tions available for research in the Lehigh Libraries. For example: the John C. Hirsh Collection of rare Medieval Manuscript Leaves and Fragments, a collection of over 150 separate items. Debby Barcan donated over 500 vintage postcards, primarily of Swiss origin, along with a collection of salesman’s sample books, and Victorian literature. Another note worthy donation, the Wilbur Family papers, was an important addition to Lehigh and South Bethlehem history. Donated by Marina Pachini, the archival collection contains correspondence relating to the Packer and Wilbur families. Special Collections worked closely with professor Allison Mickel and students from Archeology 112 to research the history of the property currently occupied by the Humanities Center. With librarians, students mined genealogical, topographical, and his torical research collections to determine the history of the site. Community members had the opportunity to find out what was excavated here on campus by viewing a display of artifacts during an evening event sponsored by the Lehigh University South Side Initiative at the South Branch of the Bethlehem Public Library in May. The team also facilitated the research of Kevin Federico, recipient of a Dale S. Strohl Undergraduate Research Grant, who conducted research into an astronomical medieval manuscript from Lehigh’s col lection in collaboration with astrophysics professor Ginny McSwain. His research has documented how medieval scholars calculated dates and religious
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