Preserving Local History/CBR wrapup

This post marks the formal end of our Preserving Local History project. Both Rachel Sanders and Megan Coker graduated in early May and are off to  graduate school pursuing library and information studies degrees; Rachel will be attending UNC Chapel Hill, and Megan is entering the USC in Columbia in the fall. We wish them well and the very best as they continue their studies  They really made our project possible and were wonderful representatives for UNCG out in the community, and a delight to work with. as well.

David Gwynn, Digital Projects Coordinator, at final CBR group presentation on April 24.

We participated in the final CBR group presentations on April 24, which included this PowerPoint presentation We also submitted our final report to the Office of Leadership and Service-Learning in May. For the project proper, one of our primary goals was to create a best practices manual. This publication brings together information we uncovered from our camera and equipment tests and from working out various procedures, and combines them in a short, hopefully readable, manual. As you will see there were both successes and challenges, most of which we overcame to our satisfaction. If you are interested in using a portable camera-based digitizing approach to capture and preserve your valuable historical materials, we hope you will find this helpful. It is possible that we will update it in the future, as we find other or better approaches to field-based digitization, so you might want to check back in the next year. If you have any questions whatsoever, please feel free to contact David Gwynn at jdgwynn@uncg.edu.

One additional item we would like to share, which took a lot of work on Rachel’s part, is a transcript of the team and community meeting conversations that occurred at the November 19, 2013 meeting held at College Place Methodist Church. This was a very useful and informative event and we were very appreciative of those who came to the meeting and shared information and concerns.

Finally, and most importantly, you will see on the UNCG Digital Collections website that we created a Community Collections section where we have placed the digitized material we did for College Place United Methodist Church. You will also note that we did some additional field scanning at Lindley Elementary School, First Presbyterian Church, and at West Market Street United Methodist Church. Several other organizations who attended the November 19 meeting at CPUMC expressed an interest in having us come out during the Spring to their locations. We sincerely apologize that we were not able to accommodate more of you, since we certainly value your institutions and your historical materials. We would love to do more, and in fact are hoping that we can continue this process in some form in the future.

This has been a great experience for us, for the University, and hopefully for the organizations that participated in our survey and meeting.

We hope to continue the community outreach in the future as we move forward toward creating a local history website that can accommodate a wide range of material from organizations and individuals throughout the city.

-  by Stephen Catlett