Digitization priorities, 2019-2020

The Digital Projects Priorities Team met on 7 August 2019 and approved the following projects for 2019-2020:

New projects:

Grant-funded digitization:

• Women Who Answered the Call: Digitizing the Oral Histories of Women who Served in the U.S. Military and the American Red Cross:
  Digitize and preserve at-risk audiovisual materials (303 audiocasettes, 6 open-reel audiotapes, and 1 VHS videotape) that are part of the Women Veterans Historical Project. Funded via a CLIR Recordings at Risk Grant (Beth Ann Koelsch and David Gwynn)

Library-funded digitization:

• Public Domain Cello Scores and Journals: The project would include the digitization of public domain scores and a set of journals from the Cello Music Collection (Stacey Krim).
• UNCG Dance Theses, 1951-1978:
  This proposal seeks to digitize a collection of Dance theses created by UNCG students between 1951 and 1978. These unique materials exist only in physical copies at this time, and they were not included in a previous retrospective thesis and dissertation digitization project due to considerations including size and accompanying materials (Anna Craft).
• Poetas sin Fronteras: Poets Without Borders, the Scrapbooks of Dr. Ramiro Lagos:
  The proposed project is to digitize a series of scrapbooks and photograph albums documenting the life and career of Dr. Ramiro Lagos, a professor emeritus of poetry in the Romance Languages Department at UNCG, to facilitate access online and to return some of the physical items back to the donor (Patrick Dollar).
• Digitizing of Home Economics Material in UNCG LIbrary Stacks:
  Digitize pre-1923 home economics items, ranging from cookbooks to books about household arithmetic, which are housed in the stacks (Callie Coward and Erica Rau).

Faculty research projects:

• Civil Rights Oral Histories:
  Pilot project to make available interviews conducted by Matthew Barr (Media Studies) as part of a documentary project using OHMS (Oral History Metadata Synchronizer) and the Omeka platform. This will serve as a proof of concept for an upcoming grant application that will involve collaboration between the University Libraries and Media Studies.

Community outreach projects:

• Temple Emmanuel Project:
  Support Temple Emmanuel in a grant application to digitize newsletters by providing set-up support and hosting for the materials.

Continuing/ongoing projects:

Grant-funded digitization:

• People Not Property: NC Slave Deeds Project:
  Year 2 of an NHPRC-funded project to digitize and transcrive scale deeds from 26 North Carolina counties. Collaborative endeavor between the UNCG University Libraries, North Carolina Division of Archives and Records, and North Carolina Registers of Deeds among others.

Library-funded digitization:

• North Carolina Runaway Slaves Ads Project, Phase 2
• Graduate, Summer Session, and Extension Bulletins

Faculty research projects:

• Oral Contraceptive Ads:
  Support digitization and hosting of a research project for Dr, Heather Adams (English) via a UNCG Libraries Digital Partners Grant.
• Well-Crafted NC:
  Support digitization and hosting a of a project by Erin Lawrimore, Richard Cox, David Gwynn (all UNCG Libraries) and Dr. Erick Byrd (Marketing, Entrepreneurship, Hospitality & Tourism) supported by a P2 Grant from the UNCG Office of Community Engagement.
• PRIDE! of the Community:
  Support continuation of a project by Stacey Krim, Partick Dollar, and David Gwynn (UNCG Libraries), initially funded through an NEH grant to document the Triad's LGBTQ+ community
• TriadHistory.org:
  Continue efforts to expand web presence and community events via a collaborative local history collective of Triad cultural heritage institutions. UNCG representatives are David Gwynn (chair) and Erin Lawrimore.

Community outreach projects:

• Junior League Reports:
  Continue digitization of archival material documenting Greensboro history.

Infrastructure projects:

• Islandora Migration:
  Complete migration of digital content to a new platform,

Big changes

Over the next year or so, we will be making big changes to the UNCG Digital Collections as we move to a new content management system and create a brand new user experience. More details will follow, but our hope is that the new website will make it easier for users to find information, and will provide better search and viewing options for our collections. The look and feel will be simplified and should be much more accessible on mobile devices. Our collections will also continue to be discoverable through WorldCat and the Digital Public Library of America.

There may be some impact and a few moments of confusion starting in a few months as we begin migrating our collections to the new platform. We will try to keep you updated and to minimize the disruptions. The main thing you may notice to begin with is that we will be adding very little new content for the next few months as we do not want to end up adding items in two different places.

Again, more details will follow. We're excited!

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.

Gatewood, handbooks, and more...

Some recent additions to our digital collections:

Maud Gatewood Collection:
We are currently midway through the digitzation of the papers of artist Maud Gatewood, for whom the Gatewood Studio Arts building at UNCG is named. Among the items that have been added so far are a large collection of sketchbooks and loose sketches demonstrating her development as a visual artist.

Student Handbooks:
The full run of student handbooks from UNCG and its predcessors, from 1897 to 2011 is now online, The scrapbooks give a detailed picture of campus life, including rules and regulations, social opportunities, and more, and are the perfect complement to the bulletins and course catalogs that are already online.

And some existing collections with significant new material:

• Cello Music Collections
• School of Music Recital Programs
• Oral History Interviews
• Women Veterans Historical Project

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.)

Digital collections by the numbers

Did you know that:

• UNCG Digital Collections currently has approximately half a million page and photo images online? This total includes:
• 8500 newspapers
• 8086 photographs
• 1914 pamphlets
• 897 oral history interviews
• 864 magazines and periodicals
• 857 books
• 487 scrapbooks
• We have 31033 items in WorldCat and 33101 items in the Digital Public Library of America? (An "item" can be made up of any number of page images).
• Our collections have had well over half a million page views over the past year.
• We have digitized and placed online material from over 750 physical collections, about 125 of which were contributed by our community partners.
• We have digitized material that is over 900 years old, though most of our material dates from 1800 or later.