Profile: Ryan Dittmar, Friends of the Library Graduate Assistant 2024-2025

As the 2024-2025 academic year comes to an end, we say goodbye and thank you to Ryan Dittmar, a graduate student in the Department of Art and Design. Working under the supervision of Tom Pulhamus, Digital Technology Librarian in the Digital Collections and Preservation (DCP) department, the graduate assistantship is generously funded by the Friends of the Library endowment. 

As Ryan completed his final month of the assistantship, we asked him about his experience working in DCP. 

1.What’s the most interesting thing that you digitized? 

For me the most interesting thing that I digitized was an issue of camera works. As a MFA student who focuses on photography it was really exciting to get to see an issue of it in person. A very close second to the camera works issue was a funeral catalog from the 1840s located in Pittsburgh and Allegheny City, Pennsylvania. The steel plate engravings inside were very interesting to see and surprised me with the level of detail put into every engraving. 

 2.What’s the most difficult thing that you digitized? 

 Every digitization project brought with it its own set of challenges and considerations. Although each piece of material presents its own unique set of challenges there is one that was the most intensive. There was one map from the Wilson map collection (    )that presented us with many considerations. The length of the map was around eight feet long and at the maximum width that we are able to shoot. To get the map digitized we had to make temporary modifications to the table we shoot material on to make it longer. Also, we had to carefully plan out how we would manipulate the map in order to shoot it in sections. After, it had to be digitally stitched together. All of this added up to quite the challenge, but we were able to do it! 

 3.Can you highlight a couple of things that you learned from this experience? 

 I am very grateful for all of the things I learned here at Digital preservation! Firstly, I learned an application of photography that I had not known before. Here we use cameras objectively compared to how in the arts I have always used cameras subjectively. Doing this work you take the basics of photography to a whole new level. You need to have a complete understanding of all the functions of a camera and in what ways they affect images in order to get the best picture. Another large aspect of this work is the handling of rare materials. I learned how to handle priceless material and how to safely digitize them. Lastly, Just getting the opportunity to learn about all of the rare book materials available to us here at UD was really wonderful. I got to look at and learn about materials I would have otherwise never gotten the chance to see.  

 4.Is there anything else that you’d like to add? 

 I’d just like to say how appreciative I am for the opportunity to work here at digital preservation! It was a very rewarding experience overall, and I am very grateful to the people here in the department that I worked with and learned from over the last year. I’m excited that for now this opportunity is being continued and that another MFA student will get to experience this as well!