Rachael Damms, a senior history major at Mississippi University for Women, has constructed a digital walking tour of campus as part of her Capstone research project.

The Capstone research project is a collation of courses history majors take. The project is one of two required upper-level courses that students must take before they graduate from The W.

Since there is no digital tour of The W’s campus, Damms, a Starkville native, said the original idea was to create an historical walking tour of the university. She worked closely with her Capstone adviser, Dr. Erin Kempker, to come up with the project.

HistoryPin was recommended to Damms by Mona Vance-Ali, archivist at the Columbus Lowndes Public Library. Vance-Ali explained to Damms that the digital tour was an effective website to provide the public history of the campus.

Accessible online, the tour is basically a sequence of collection of pins that users can organize by preference. Individuals who use the tour may click on the “take the tour” tab, which takes them through the pins in the order they have organized them.

“The W is a place that has rich and interesting history,” Damms said. “I chose the subjects of the pins based on their importance to understanding the early history of the university and on how much source material that was available for me.”

The images she chose were accessed through the Mississippi Digital Library at www.msdiglib.org/. Digitized images and documents are contained on this website though libraries and archives all over Mississippi.

Damms also used two books to gather history for the tours. One of the books, titled “Golden Days,” is a collection of oral interviews with W alumnae edited by Dr. Bridget Smith Pieshel. “Loyal Daughters,” also written by Pieschel and her husband, Stephen, was used as a resource. Damms also wrote content to accompany the pins.

She was excited to be able to create a small resource that makes part of the campus history known to others, which users can just type in the location from the campus and it will show those particular pins.

She said the process is simple when uploading content to the website. Users can upload images from their own computer to link an image anywhere on the internet. They can pin the location through an included Google Map function.

If there is a Google street view available, the users have the option to overlay the uploaded image on the street view, which will give them the results. Also, there is a text box to add description of the pin along with an option users can cite where they got the image.

Damms chose her pins because they were the most recognizable and important features of The W’s history. There are a total of 20 images pinned to her page, which have been viewed 97 times.

In addition to reflecting on what they have learned and what it means to be a historian, students also will focus on three optional components of the class, which include a traditional research paper, teacher certification, or public history alternative.

To access the online tour at HistoryPin, please visit HistoryPin.com.