Librarians and archivists are always called on to help bring documents and their history to life.

But Katherine “Kay” Walter – a baseball fanatic – recently had a chance to help give a baseball legend a new voice.

Working with ESPN.com’s reporters and producers on a special archiving and digitization project on Lou Gehrig’s last letters, Walter and UNL libraries’ expertise helped ESPN create an interactive digital archive of the baseball legend’s personal correspondence that captivated ESPN.com’s Web site visitors.

“I thought it was pretty exciting that ESPN had found these (Lou Gehrig’s) letters and were able to get permission to do a digital treatment with them,” Walter said. “I’m very interested in baseball actually. And reading through these letters, it was very moving.”

Walter

The project was featured on ESPN.com on the July 4 weekend – the 70th anniversary of Gehrig’s famous speech.

ESPN.com’s senior enterprise editor Jena Janovy – daughter of UNL’s John and Karen Janovy – in May contacted Walter, chair and professor of UNL Libraries’ Digital Initiatives and Special Collections and co-director of the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, for information and advice on how to conserve and reproduce the letters. Her goal was to make a large portion of the Gehrig letters available to the public on ESPN.com, in their original authentic form, for the first time.

Access Gehrig’s speech at http://go.unl.edu/sm5 and an interactive Web site at http://go.unl.edu/uo6.