William Sidney Porter a/k/a O. Henry

Original pencil drawing by William Sydney Porter

UNCG Digital Collections is excited to be working with the Greensboro History Museum to host digitized items from the William Sydney Porter Papers, 1839-1982.

Porter, a Greensboro native, was better known by the pseudonym O. Henry, was the well-known author of some two hundred published short stories, including "The Ransom of Red Chief" and "The Gift of the Magi."

The William Sydney Porter Papers contain many first editions, as well as correspondence, printed materials, financial/legal documents, and literary productions. The collection also includes scrapbooks, radio dramalogues, newspaper clippings, sketches and drawings, photographs, magazines, paintings and an audio recording. The bulk of material dates from William Sydney Porter’s lifetime, 1862-1910.

Only selected items from the collection have been digitized, specifically the correspondence series and portions of the financial/legal and artwork series. Additional items may be digitized in the future.

The full collection may be viewed at the Greensboro History Museum.

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.

Full house

A full house in Digital Projects working on Good Medicine. We're closing in on the halfway point, with almost 20,000 items scanned. Many of these are already online as well, although the site is technically "under construction."

We've also added new material to the Cello Collections and Composer Collections, not to mention the full run of North Carolina Community Progress, an extension publication of the North Carolina College for Women (now UNCG) from the 1920s.

And, by the way, we've redesigned our website to make it easier to explore our collections. Let us know what you think!

Digitization project priorities, 2016-2017

The University Libraries Digital Projects Priorities Team met on Wednesday 22 June and approved the following priority projects for 2016-2017:

New projects:

Good Medicine: Greensboro’s Hospitals and Healers, 1865-2015
This LSTA-funded project will digitize over 47,000 documents, photographs, and other items related to the growth of medical practice and institutions in Greensboro and will include materials from the Cone Health Medical Library, the Greensboro Public Library, and the Greensboro Historical Museum in addition to the Martha Blakeney Hodges Special Collections and University Archives at UNCG.

This grant is made possible through funding from the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by the State Library of North Carolina, a division of the Department of Cultural Resources.

Women's Professional Association Records
Contains meeting minutes, agendas, correspondence, and organizational records from the Women's Professional Forum, a local women's organization that was founded in Greensboro in 1977. The forum has presented UNCG with a donation to defray the cost of digitization.

Early Cello Manuscripts and Published Works
The pieces selected for this digital project are among the earliest and rarest works found in the Cello Music Collection. In many cases, UNCG is the only library or archive worldwide with the holdings for these editions which date to the 1700s.

Peter Paul Fuchs Papers
Peter Paul Fuchs (1916-2007) was a conductor, composer, teacher, and a significant figure in the performing arts history of Greensboro. Materials too be digitized and included in the Cello Music Collection include 74 unpublished music scores and parts, totaling more than 1600 pages.

North Carolina Alpha Delta Kappa Collection
ADK is an international honorary organization for women educators and these scrapbooks (dating 1954-1994) represent a completely unique view of the activities of a women's organization.

Ongoing projects:

Cone Hospital Collection
This project, undertaken through the financial support of Cone Health, involves digitizing some 15,000 photographs and other documents that chronicle the history of Greensboro's Moses H. Cone Memorial Hospital. Target date for completion is December, 2016.

Women Veterans Historical Project
Additional oral histories, photographs, and other items will be added to this extensive digital collection documenting the service of women in the American armed forces, once of UNCG's most used digital resources.

Maud Gatewood Collection
Gatewood was an instrumental part of the art in North Carolina during the late 20th and early 21st century. As a graduate of Woman’s College, she is also part of our institution’s history. Her entire collection, including thousands of sketches, along with correspondence and other materials, is being digitized.

I Wish To Say
This project will create a digital archive of the "I Wish to Say" project undertaken by UNCG Assistant Professor Dr. Sheryl Oring, and will present images and transcriptions of messages composed and sent through the project since 2004. Target date for completion is December, 2016.

Pre-1923 Children's Literature
This project encompasses digitizing approximately 100 public domain children’s books from the Early Juvenile Literature Collection, Woman’s Collection, and Special Collections General, some dating to the 1700s.

Metadata and exploratory projects:

We will also be moving forward on:

• The ongoing metadata cleanup for the American Publishers Trade Bindings Collection.
• A new project to create more user-friendly and browsable categories for our digital collections.
• A new project to add rights and usage statements that correspond with the DPLA/Europeana model and offer users a more accurate picture of the rights (and re-use) status of our materials.

Further, we will be working to solicit partners and attract funding for the second phase of the north Carolina Runaway Slave Ads Project, to discover and digitze ads placed between 1840 and 1865.

It's going to be a busy year!

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.)

Greensboro community history site added

Material digitized as part of UNCG's partnership with the Hayes-Taylor YMCA Youth Achievers program is now online!

Over the past year, we have been working with students in the Hayes-Taylor program and with community members to uncover rare and personal items that are of unique historical value and that might not have made their way into a digital collection otherwise. We encouraged community members to contribute items that they thought were significant and documented a particular aspect of Greensboro's history with specific attention given to African-American communities in the southeastern quadrant of the city.

Greensboro residents brought in some amazing items. Here is a small sample:

• Two photos documenting Greensboro's East Market Street business district, which was destroyed in a 1960s urban renewal project.
• A scrapbook created by Mrs. Hyla Cundiff druing her time at Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte from 1944-1948.
• Material documenting the life and work of Walter Lewis McNair, the first African-American pharmacist in Greensboro. 
• A photo album containing rare photographs of Dudley High School in the late 1930s taken by a student who later became a Tuskeegee Airman.
• Several photographs showing the Caldwella nd Foushee families and their lives in Greensboro's Terra Cotta community from the 1950s to the 2000s.

We will be spotlighting additional items from this amazing project here and on our Facebook page in the coming weeks. The project was completed using funds from a federal Institute of Museum and Library Services Sparks! Ignition Grant.

Explorers digitizing Greensboro history

By Stephen Catlett

The UNCG-Hayes-Taylor IMLS Sparks! Ignition grant has gotten off to a great start since we officially launched to the public on February 21. Mayor Pro Tem Yvonne Johnson generously agreed to help kick off our project that day, and within a week we had a select group of seven students from the Y's Achievers program. 

These DGH Explorers (Digitizing Greensboro History) have already participated in a lively history conversation with Community Historian Linda Evans of the Greensboro Historical Museum on March 7. And since then have received training on the use of digital cameras and scanners. We started with the actual capturing of some of the Y's own history, digitizing photographs and newspaper clippings on April 4.

Our first "In The Field" session took place last night (April 16) at the law office of local lawyer Richard Gabriel, of Gabriel Berry Weston and Wells. Mr. Gabriel's father, George, operated two small grocery stores on East Market and East Washington Streets after 1940. Richard worked closely with his father and mother and has wonderful stories and information about East Greensboro, especially the vibrant business community as it existed before Urban Renewal destroyed it in the 1960s and 1970s. His father was well respected in the community, especially with the Bennett College students. They autographed Mr. Gabriel's personal copies of the Bennett yearbook, thanking him for his generosity, especially in providing store credit. As one student wrote: "Without your store I would have gone hungry plenty of nights."

We plan to capture more history in the next two months, but it has been especially gratifying working with these young students, who are very inspiring.

Community collections (SNCA presentation)

Recent presentation to the Society of North Carolina Archivists on community collaboration and outreach through our collections:

UNCG begins work on IMLS Sparks!Ignition Grant project

Work has begun on a new collaborative project involving the Digital Projects Unit of the University Libraries at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro and the Hayes-Taylor YMCA. The Digital Projects Unit has been awarded a 2014-2015 IMLS Sparks! Ignition Grant for Libraries and will manage this $23,522 grant in partnership with the Hayes-Taylor YMCA and their Achievers Program.

The youth at the Hayes-Taylor YMCA will participate in discussions on local history and digital photography, learn the proper handling of historical and archival materials, and will visit area libraries and archives. These young DGHi (Digitizing Greensboro Historical information) Explorers will be taught to use flatbed scanners and digital cameras as document "scanners."

Teamed with YMCA mentors, the youths will go into homes and organizations in the community to discover and reproduce hidden historical documents with digital cameras. The completion of questionnaires will permit the UNCG Libraries to place the material online. There will also be significant public outreach, including a "community history scanning day" held at the new Hayes-Taylor YMCA, and a capstone display of some of items and information discovered during the course of the project.

Project staff at University Libraries include Digital Projects Coordinator David Gwynn as project director, J. Stephen Catlett as project manager. Felton Foushee, Achievers Director at Hayes-Taylor YMCA, will coordinate the DGHi Explorers.

Digital collections update

The fall semester was a busy one as we completed or continued work on several projects:

Performing arts collections:

Our digital cello music presence has grown dramatically in the past few months as we added over six thousand pages of manuscript materials and other selections from the following physical collections:

• Lev Aronson Musical Score Collection
• Elizabeth Cowling Musical Score Collection
• Maurice Eisenberg Musical Score Collection
• Fritz Magg Musical Score Collection
• Rudolf Matz Musical Score Collection
• Janos Scholz Musical Score Collection
• Luigi Silva Musical Score Collection and Personal Papers
• Laszlo Varga Musical Score Collection

Local history collections:

Following the successful launch last year of Textiles, Teachers, and Troops, we have added a considerable amount of newly-digitized material on the history of Greensboro, primarily as part of two collections:

• Postwar Urban Renewal and Planning in Greensboro: A collection of  more than four thousand pages of documents illustrating the drmatic changes (some good and some bad) that took place as the result of redevelopment activities in Greensboro following World War II. This project is a collaborative effort between the University Libraries, the Greensboro Public Library, and the Greensboro Historical Museum.
• Records of the Fisher Park Neighborhood Association: Approximately four thousand pages of materials documenting the establishment and growth of Greensboro's first historic district. These materials were digitized in part through a grant from the City of Greensboro's Building Better Communities program.

UNCG collections:

Another big addition has been the Campus Theatre Productions Collection held by the Martha Blakeney Hodges Special Collections and University Archives (SCUA), with neraly five thousand pages of documents pertaining to plays and other productions performed on campus between 1897 and 1963.

We have also nearly completed digitization of most of the scrapbooks held in SCUA's manuscript collections; this project follows a three-year project in which we digitized scrapbooks held as part of the University Archives.

Last but not least, we have finalized the digitization and display of the Robert Watson Papers and the Randall Jarrell Papers.

Redesigned/enhanced collections:

One of our most significant achievements this semester has been the migration of Civil Rights Greensboro and the Betty H. Carter Women Veterans Historical Project onto the CONTENTdm server platform, which will allow increased search and discovery options and allow us to integrate those collections into Worldcat and the Digital Public Library of America.

Still to come:

Still in progress this year are additions to the Home Economics Pamphlets collection, the Lois Lenski Juvenile Literature Collection, and a pilot project to digitize items from the Anna Gove Papers. And later this year, we will begin the bulk of the work on an IMLS-funded local history project with the Hayes Taylor YMCA Digital Explorers project. More later on these projects!

Urban development, pamphlets, slavery records, and Civil Rights Greensboro

Annual report and map, City Of Greensboro, North Carolina, 1965-1966

There are many changes and updates afoot in out digital collections, and more are on the way.

Civil Rights Greensboro
This collection, online since 2009, has recently been migrated into our CONTENTdm hosting platform. This move provides some significant benefits, including faceted search capability, full-text search within the oral histories and many other documents, and higher-resolution images. The move will also allow this collection to be added to the Digital Public Library of America and to Worldcat. As part of the upgrade, we have also added to the collection over four hundred newspaper articles dating from the 1960 sit-ins that were digitized by the Greensboro Public Library.

A similar migration is planned for the Women Veterans Historical Project later this year.

Digital Library on American Slavery
The Development Team here in the University Libraries has built an outstanding new interface that brings together the search functions of the Race and Slavery Petitions Project and the NC Runaway Slave Ads project. But this is just the beginning. We will soon be adding other databases from different institutions  to the search interface so as to allow "one-stop shopping" for any number of slavery-related collections. Hats off the ERIT Development Team for pulling this all together!

Greensboro Urban Development
We are currently adding material to a new Greensboro history collection, spotlighting urban development in Greensboro, particularly in the years after World War II. This collection will include planning documents, maps, scrapbooks, and other materials documenting downtown development, urban renewal activities, the growth of historic districts, and more. The collection currently features planning-related content held by UNCG University Libraries but we will soon be adding additional material from the Greensboro Public Library and the Greensboro Historical Museum. In addition, we are currently digitizing the archives of the Fisher Park Neighborhood Association, Greensboro's first designated historic district.

New material is going online every week.

Home Economics and Nutrition Pamphlets
We have completed the second phase of digitization on this popular project and are in the process of placing online approximately three hundred new pamphlets that run the gamut from product manuals to cookbooks, all of which are held by the Martha Blakeney Hodges Special Collections and University Archives. This is a great look at home culture throughout the Twentieth Century and it's also a lot of fun.

Three hundred new items should be online by early September.

More soon:
Watch this space for updates coming soon to our Manuscript Collections, Cello Music Collections, and University Archives Images and Documents.

Digital Projects end-of-year update, 2013-2014

At the end of the academic year, we do a report to the Digital Projects Priorities Team on the past year's activities. This is an edited version of that report. It was a very productive year.

My thanks to the team: to Erica Rau and Kathy Howard in Digital Projects, who did such great work on so many projects; to Callie Coward and Anna Craft from Cataloging; and to Scott Hinshaw, Kathelene McCarty Smith, and everyone else in the Martha Blakeney Hodges Special Collections and University Archives. Thanks as well to the department where Digital Projects "lives", Electronic Resources and Information Technology, for a level of support that goes far beyond the call of duty. We couldn't so many great projects without a real collaborative team and I really appreciate the way everyone pulls together to accomplish all our goals!

Special thanks to Stephen Catlett, who completes his tenure as Textiles, Teachers, and Troops project manager this week after doing some amazing work over the past two years. Stephen did an incredible job working with our partners and students on TTT as well as with community outreach on our CBR/local history grant project and coordination of displays and our launch event in April. We are very much going to miss having him around and hope we can rectify that situation soon!

Also, many thanks to this year's team of student workers (Evan Chu, Megan Coker, Tatiana Cox, Rachel Sanders, James Stewart, Phil White, and Hayley Whitehead) and our volunteers (Larry Daniels, Bernitae Reed, and Touger Vang). Your efforts are much appreciated and we couldn't do any of this without you!

An announcement of this year's approved and continuing projects will be available in the next few weeks.

2013-2014 Project Status:

• American Publishers Trade Bindings Phase 6: Complete and online (159 images).
• Campus Life Photos: In progress (322 images).
• CBR Project/Community Collections: Complete and online (1137 images).
• Class of 1951-present: Complete and online (11031 images).
• Creative Writing Manuscript Collections: Nearly complete, mostly online.
• Robert Watson Papers: Complete and online (5973 images).
• Randall Jarrell Papers: Nearly complete, partially online. Should be fully online by September. (6544 images to date).
• Ege Manuscripts: Complete and online (101 images).
• Home Economics Pamphlets Phase II: Scanned, should be online by early July at the latest (8184 images).
• Lois Lenski Rare Books: In progress. 13 books scanned. Should be online by fall. (625 images)
• Manuscript Collections Scrapbooks: In progress, many already online. Probably 15-20 remain. All should be online by December. (10159 images this year)
• Music and Theatre Productions: Nearly done, many already online. Should be completely online August at the latest (2843 images to date).
• Oral History Collections: Approximately 20 new interviews online.
• Textiles, Teachers, and Troops: Substantially complete and online (no annual breakdown, approximately 15000 images in-house plus 125000 items from the Charles Duncan McIver Records outsourced this year, two-year total of approximately 180000 images).
• Women Veterans Historical Project: Approximately 15 new oral histories online, 100 other items.

Other Projects:

• DigitalGreensboro.org interface completed by ERIT Development Team.
• Civil Rights Greensboro Migration To CONTENTdm: Complete and should be live this summer.
• Women Vets Migration: Data dump and work plan complete. Target date for completion: early October.
• Worldcat Integration: Most collections now included in Worldcat. 
• DPLA Submission: Most collections now included in Digital Public Library of America. We are currently the third largest contributor in the state (24641 items) with three times as much material as number four.
• Creation of CONTENTdm landing pages based on priority focus areas:
• Local and Regional History
• Performing Arts
• University History
• Women's History

Some Numbers:

We now have 251003 digital files in CONTENTdm, our digital content management system, making 25243 items and spanning nearly a thousand years of history...although most are admittedly from the past 150 years or so.

Included are:

• 8243 newspapers
• 4968 photos/photo folders
• 2223 clippings/folders and items containing clipping
• 1529 pamphlets
• 928 pieces of correspondence
• 702 music scores

Textiles, Teachers, and Troops project launch

Textiles, teachers, and troops project launch from jdgwynn

The Digital Projects team are proud to announce the launch of Textiles, Teachers, and Troops: Greensboro, 1880-1945. The website was publicly presented last night for the first time during an event at the Greensboro Historical Museum. Speakers included Dr. Kevin Cherry, Deputy Secretary of Archives and History in the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources; Stephen Catlett; Digital Project Manager for the UNCG University Libraries; and David Gwynn, Digital Projects Coordinator at UNCG.

Textiles, Teachers, and Troops makes available more than 175,000 digital images including photographs, manuscripts, rare books, scrapbooks, printed materials, and oral histories documenting the social and cultural development of Greensboro. The project is a collaboration between UNCG, Bennett College, Greensboro College, Greensboro Historical Museum, Greensboro Public Library, Guilford College, and N.C. A&T State University, documenting the history of Greensboro from 1880-1945 through the influence of the textile industry, education, and the military.

The project was funded in part through a Library Services and Technology Act Grant administered by the State Library of North Carolina.

The project website may be seen at http://digitalgreensboro.org/.