[IQP] Designing a Method to Capture, Insert, and Retrieve Digitized Archives at St. Mary’s Parish in Panama

Sponsor: St. Mary’s Parish

Student Team: Ferris Florman, Erik Wegge, Nathan Reed

Abstract: This project addressed the issue of accessibility and damage mitigation of historical ledgers in the archives of St. Mary’s Parish in Panama. After investigating free software development tools, the team collaborated with parish staff and Footprint Possibilities to remotely build a working prototype of St. Mary’s Digital Archives, an archival database system to preserve the parish's physical archives and provide quick access to the church’s sacramental records. This software system enables parish staff and volunteers to capture and load high quality images of ledger pages, insert individual sacramental records into a MySQL database, subsequently retrieve valuable records and print out an authorized certificate of a sacramental event for parishioners and visiting researchers.

Links: Final Report

This final report is available on the WPI eProjects 2.0 platform. Please click on the link above to learn more.