History is composed of multi-dimensional phenomena that can be configured and interpreted in many ways. To celebrate Tulane’s centennial, we open a window into how the technologies of recording acquisitions and collection development have evolved from the 1920s to the present.
The two handwritten ledgers show how the librarians of the Department of Middle American Research inventoried library collections manually using paper and ink. Another way of telling the story of the collections is through data visualizations created from the raw acquisition statistics of these early handwritten entries and data born digitally in recent decades. Data visualization is a vibrant and impactful alternative way to tell the story of how the collection Tulane acquired from William Gates in 1924 was transformed over the course of 100 years.