When Delaware County Community College Professor Tanya Gardner asked for volunteers in her Interpersonal Communication class, she wasn’t just filling slots for a library event. She was, unknowingly, changing the career trajectories of three of her students.

The assignment brought students Katy Gallagher, Paulina Jaus, and Taya Vietro to Ardmore Library for Community Scanning Day — a collaborative digital humanities project between DCCC, the Lower Merion Library System, and Pennsylvania Power Library.

The goal: help Ardmore community members digitize personal photographs and documents, preserving family and local histories for the Pennsylvania state repository.

What happened next was something none of them fully expected.

Preserving History, One Document at a Time

Before the event, Gardner trained the students in digital humanities tools, including high-tech scanners, document processing procedures, metadata creation, and oral history interviewing techniques. Armed with those skills, they welcomed residents who brought in treasured personal materials: old photographs, letters, documents, and maps.

Each participant had their items scanned, received a flash drive with digital copies, and was offered the chance to submit materials to the Pennsylvania Power Library’s public Photos and Documents search tool. Many chose to do so, adding their stories permanently to the state’s historical record.

The histories that emerged were striking. Gallagher, a Paralegal Studies major, described interviewing a woman who had brought in old zoning maps.

“They indicated how Ardmore changed and how big corporations popped up mostly in Black neighborhoods, sometimes pushing residents out of their communities,” she said. “That is important local history. Another woman descended from immigrants from Ukraine and had photos of her great-great-grandmother. They looked almost identical.”

For Jaus, a Communications major, the most memorable moment came from interviewing a woman whose mother had lived to 110 years old:

“The daughter had so much historical information to offer, and now — thanks to this project — it will one day be in the Pennsylvania Power Library, so it is recorded historically as well. People will be able to use the added information to see how their communities evolved.”

A Project That Opened New Doors

The impact went well beyond the library walls. For all three students, the experience reframed what they thought their futures could look like.

Gallagher said the project inspired her to pursue library science at a four-year university after DCCC.

“The professors at DCCC are amazing,” she said. “Dr. Gardner has really taken me under her wing, and this project opened my eyes to what truly interests me.”

Vietro — a former Hairstylist and Life Coach who returned to college as an adult — found her calling in the stacks as well.

“It is so easy to lose history,” she said. “We want to make sure that the next generations can find the information, to understand the historical demographics of the communities in which they live.” She plans to transfer to a four-year university to study digital humanities, with the goal of becoming a Research Librarian.

Vietro has continued working with Gardner beyond the Ardmore event, contributing to the professor’s ongoing oral history initiative “Voices of Faith” — a project collecting, digitizing, and archiving the experiences of 20 Philadelphia-area Black church leaders during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Jaus reflected on the professional value the experience added to her communications studies: “I have collected oral histories, learned how to properly handle and preserve historical documents, and gained a better understanding of the rich history of our region.”

Why Digital Humanities Matters

Projects like Community Scanning Day represent a growing intersection of technology, storytelling, and civic responsibility. By training community college students in metadata creation, document preservation, and oral history methods, DCCC is equipping a new generation of information professionals — while ensuring that the stories of everyday people don’t disappear.

For Gardner, the collaboration between DCCC, the Lower Merion Library System, and Pennsylvania Power Library is exactly the kind of work that makes community college education transformative, both inside the classroom and far beyond it.

Learn more at Delaware County Community College and how its educational programs and services remain student-focused, accessible, comprehensive, and flexible to meet the educational needs of the diverse communities it serves.