Digital Projects Status, 2016-2017

Good Medicine
This LSTA-funded project involved digitizing 47,000 items (over 62,000 items were ultimately completed) related to the history of medical practice in Greensboro. The $60,000-plus grant was completed in collaboration with the Greensboro History Museum, Cone Health Medical Library, and the Greensboro Public Library, with UNCG as the lead.

• Project is complete and we exceeded the number of items promised by nearly 15,000.
• 62,000-plus items online, making it our largest completely in-house project ever.
• New pathfinders completed to link to specific topic-based items in lieu of more traditional contextual essays: http://libcdm1.uncg.edu/cdm/goodmedpathways/

Cone Hospital Records
This project resulted in the digitization of nearly 20,000 items from the Cone Hospital Collection held by the Cone Health Medical Library. Cone Health provided corporate funding for the project.

• Complete with the exception of a couple of low-priority scrapbooks we're finishing up. All funding has been received, though we were actually under budget on payroll.
• This project led to the larger Good Medicine project (above).

I Wish to Say
This project, part of the University Libraries Digital Partners Grant program, digitized and transcribed  items from UNCG faculty member Sheryl Oring’s “I Wish to Say” art project, specifically 3200 postcards composed by participants and mailed to national and world leaders. Oring’s project has received significant national attention and has been published in a book. We coordinated the digitization and ingest into CONTENTdm and the devlopment team built an API-based interface.

• Complete. Working on a second phase.
• Over 3200 items online.

Slave Ads Grant
A UNCG strategic seed grant ($20,000) was to support a pilot project for the next phase of the NC Runaway Slave Ads project (one of our most-used digitized collections) which will identify, digitize, and transcribe ads that appeared in North Carolina newspapers from 1840-1865. The grant supports hiring of student workers to benchmark the project and also to coordinate a classroom integration aspect, with HIS and LIS students working on class projects related to the project.

• Applied for and received UNCG strategic seed grant. Project in progress.
• Worked with 3 classes already, 2 student workers hired.

Women's Professional Forum Records
This collection was donated to the Martha Blakeney Hodges Special Collections and University Archives with funds for processing and digitization.

• Processing was not complete for last year's cycle.
• Student in place and working on this now. May hire an additional student.

American Publishers Trade Bindings metadata cleanup
This is a project to clean up faulty metadata associated with a ten-year-old (but ongoing) digitization project involving rare decorative bookbindings.

• Almost done. projected completion late summer/early fall.

Children's Literature (Phase 2)
A project to digitize unique and rare children’s books held by UNCG.

• In progress as time and resources permit.

Early Cello Manuscripts
Project to digitize early cello manuscripts, some dating to the 1700s, from our vast cello music holdings.

• Complete. Added an additional 500-plus pages in addition to the promised 750.

Maud Gatewood Papers
Project to digitize the papers of artist Maud Gatewood, for whom UNCG’s studio arts building is named. The collection includes thousands of sketches in addition to other items.

• Largely complete. Still assessing some oversize sketches for scanning vs. photography.

Peter Paul Fuchs Papers (Phase 1)
Project to digitize music scores pertaining to Peter Paul Fuchs, a Greensboro conductor, composer, and teacher.

• Complete. Approximately 1600 pages of material.

Women Veterans Historical Project
Ongoing contributions to one of our most-used digitized collections.

• Added 24 oral histories, plus about 500 additional items (photos, documents, etc.)

Alpha Delta Kappa Records
Digitized records (mostly scrapbooks) from collection of records related to an organization of women educators at UNCG.

• In progress: Promised 3600 pages, completed 7611 pages. Maybe halfway done at this point.
• Project much bigger than anticipated.

Metadata projects

• DPLA rights statements (http://rightsstatements.org/) completely implemented on all but one collection. ETA for completion: End of July.
• Worked out local subject tags issue controlled vocabulary and implemented changes on Good Medicine. Holding off on retrofitting other collections pending CDM replacement.

Other accomplishments, side projects, etc.

• CONTENTdm site redesign with new navigation and improved user interface. 
• Additional small-project work with Greensboro History Museum:
• Price School Scrapbook
• World War I Scrapbooks: Online shortly.
• O. Henry Correspondence: Online shortly.
• Greensboro Business Magazine digitization completed.

Using Research Aids for Good Medicine

We are excitedly nearing the completion of our LSTA-funded Good Medicine project. As of last week, we had uploaded 3,850 items on the Greensboro's history of medical institutions and the practice of medicine We also know that this is a lot for anyone to comb through without some kind of guide, and to that end we've put together a few research aids to get you started in all your history of Greensboro medicine needs: what we've been calling the pathway.

These are guides to finding primary source materials for some of the research for which we know Good Medicine is needed. Each research aid will offer a very short summary of some of the history surrounding the topic. Then it will have a series of direct links to primary source items in the project. It will also point you to other parts of UNCG's digital offerings on the topic, bringing together materials from the Betty H. Carter Women Veterans Historical Project, Civil Rights Greensboro, and a number of other UNCG and community resources. The first topic guide completed was on the topic of the Simkins v. Moses H. Cone Memorial Hospital, 323 F.2d 959 (1963) court case, credited with ending segregation in publicly funded health care.

The pathfinder currently has the following topic guides:

• The Greensboro, N.C., Chapter of the American Red Cross
• Dr. Robert L. Phillips and the documentation of Greensboro medical history
• Nursing Education in Greensboro, N.C.
• The Polio Epidemic in Greensboro, N.C.
• Dr. George Simkins, Jr. and the desegregation of healthcare
• Greensboro Hospital and New Health Business

In the future, we hope to add even more! Some of these topics might include:

• The history of individual Greensboro-area hospitals
• The growth of Richardson-Vicks and the Vick Chemical Company
• Dr. Anna Gove’s work with The University of North Carolina at Greensboro

These will be written by staff and students working on the project, and will provide context and direction in a large project. Hopefully, these will make it even easier to research Greensboro's unique contributions to public medicine.

Good Medicine Project Update

The LSTA-funded Good Medicine project is proceeding on schedule. As of last week we have scanned over 27,000 items for the project. We are currently focused on the Wesley Long Hospital Collection, the Eloise Patricia Rallings Lewis Papers, and the Dr. Anna Maria Gove Papers. We are also working on several photo collections held by the Greensboro History Museum.

The photo of Wesley Long Hospital above, taken yesterday afternoon from the LeBauer Medical Building, is quite a change from this one, taken in 1960:

Wesley Long moved to its current site in 1961 and was greatly expanded in 1976. It because part of the Cone Health system in 1997. The digital collection will eventually document all these events,

More to come!

Cone Health collection to be digitized

Judge Alfred M. Lindau and Bernard Cone at the cornerstone ceremony for Cone Hospital in 1951.

The University Libraries have entered into a partnership with the Cone Health Medical Library to digitize a large and important collection of archival materials documenting the history of Greensboro's Moses H. Cone Memorial Hospital.

Aerial view of Cone Hospital, circa 1953.

The hospital, which opened in February, 1953, was originally funded through a trust established by Bertha Cone in honor of her husband, Moses H. Cone, who was one of the founders of Cone Mills in Greensboro. The Greensboro Daily News reported that Mrs. Cone had "proposed to build the most modern hospital in the South." It is now the flagship institution of the Cone Health network, one of the largest healthcare providers in the Southeast.

Moses H. Cone.

The Cone Hospital collection contains historical information about the Cone family, who were instrumental in the development of Greensboro into the city that it is today, and a wealth of material on the background, construction, and ongoing operations and growth of Cone Hospital. Included are historical records, construction photographs, newsletters, rate books, and procedure manuals.

Of particular interest is material related to the 1963 Simkins v. Cone case which resulted in a ruling by the United States Supreme Court ending segregation in publicly-funded hospitals. Cone Health Medical Library Director Edward Donnald described the collection as "a significant historical resource with local, regional, and even national interest."

The project will digitize more than 16,000 items from the collection during 2016, and all material will be made publicly available as part of the local history portal of UNCG Digital Collections.

The partners are currently working on a grant proposal to digitize additional medical history collections held by Cone Health, the Martha Blakeney Hodges Special Collections and University Archives at UNCG, and the Greensboro Historical Museum.

(Note: Some of the quotes in this post were taken from the October, 2015, issue of Code U, the Cone Health newsletter.)