Digital collections priorities, 2018-2019

New projects

People Not Property: Slave Deeds of North Carolina
A collaborative endeavor between the UNCG University Libraries, North Carolina Division of Archives and Records, and North Carolina Registers of Deeds among others. Working as an addition to and evolution of the Digital Library on American Slavery, the project is leading towards a unique, centralized database of bills of sales indexing the names of enslaved people from across North Carolina.When complete, People Not Property will include robust metadata, high resolution images, and full-text searchable transcripts. We hope to open the project to states beyond North Carolina, creating a central location for accessing and researching slave deeds from across the Southern United States.

Photos and Concert Programs of the UNCG Cello Music Collection
The proposed project is to digitize photographs and concert programs from 4 of the Cello Music Collections: Luigi Silva, Elizabeth Cowling, Rudolf Matz, and Ennio Bolognini. The digitization of these materials would enhance the existing cello digital music collections. The concert programs would allow researchers to track the performance careers of these cellists, and the photographs would add a visually appealing component to the collection, which would make the collection more attractive to non-musicians.

Bryan School Annual Reports
Digitize the Bryan School's annual reports to the Provost, from 1969-70 to 2003-04. The Bryan School will be celebrating the 50th anniversary of its founding in the 2019-2020 academic year.

UNCG Graduate, Summer Session, and Extension Bulletins
Digitization of the bound graduate, summer session, and extension course bulletins. These will complement the undergraduate bulletins that were digitized several years ago, providing a complete picture of courses offered at UNCG since its founding. This will allow researchers to learn about these programs offered outside of the standard undergraduate curriculum.

Ongoing projects

• North Carolina Runway Slave Ads (Phase 2, 1840-1865)
• PRIDE of the Community: Triad LGBTQ+ History
• Well-Crafted: the History, Business, & Culture of NC Beer
• Women's Professional Forum Records
• Women Veterans Historical Project
• Peter Paul Fuchs Papers, Phase 2
• Islandora Migration

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.

History Students Contribute to the UNCG Runaway Slave Ad Database

During the Spring semester 2017, students in the history research methods classes, HIS 391 and 430, helped to expand the UNCG NC Runaway Slave Advertisements Database. The current database contains advertisements through 1840 and is one of the most widely used digital collections maintained by the UNCG Library. Colson Whitehead acknowledged the database as an important resource for his award winning novel, The Underground Railroad. Students researched newspapers published across North Carolina in the 1850s and 1860s to add new material to the database.

The project offered valuable firsthand experience in how primary sources are digitized and how digitization changes the research process. Library staff trained students in the use of microfilm readers and archival practices for digitizing primary sources, including scanning the original documents and identifying the metadata that will assist researchers in searching the collected advertisements. Students learned how digitization changes the process of historical interpretation—what kind of information is lost and what is gained. For example, they considered what they learned from seeing a runaway slave ad in the context of the original newspaper page and how that context is lost when ads are collected and organized in a database. On the other hand they learned it is possible to study many more digitized ads searching the database compared to the amount of time it took to read the microfilmed newspaper and identify each advertisement.

After collecting and scanning the advertisements, students designed a wide variety of individual research projects on topics inspired by the primary sources.

This advertisement for the remarkable runway, James Lord, who worked as a Pressman for the Fayetteville Observer, inspired a student research project on the ways that runaway slave ads document literacy among slaves.

Topics ranged from the experience of women runaways to constructions of African American masculinity; from medical practices documented in the ads that described marks from cupping and lancets to an exploration of the objects that runaways took with them when they escaped; from the distinctive experience of runaways in the North Carolina mountains to the maroon communities of the coast.  Newspapers from the Civil War era were included in the sample so that we could see how the last years of slavery affected runaway experience. Students made fascinating discoveries about the continued use of runaway advertisements long after the 13th Amendment ended slavery.

This advertisement for runaway George Washington was published in the Greensboro Patriot in November 1867. It inspired a student to research the role of the Freedman’s Bureau and the continued practice of indenturing workers after the Civil War ended.

The Library has been awarded a strategic seed grant to expand the database and the advertisements collected by history students will be added to the database in the coming months.

(Contributed by Dr. Lisa Tolbert, UNCG Department of History)

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!

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.

North Carolina slave ads database and website launched

The North Carolina Runaway Slave Advertisements project (NCRSA) provides online access to all known runaway slave advertisements (more than 2300 items) published in North Carolina newspapers from 1751 to 1840. These brief ads provide a glimpse into the social, economic, and cultural world of the American slave system and the specific experience within North Carolina and will be of interest to historians, genealogists, students, and casual users. The project website is available to the public at http://ncslaveadsproject.org.

NCRSA is a collaboration between the University Libraries of the University of North Carolina (UNCG) at Greensboro and the F.D. Bluford Library of North Carolina A&T State University (NC A&T).

Working from microfilmed copies of these rare publications, the project team scanned the ads to provide digital images, created full-text transcripts and descriptive metadata, and developed a searchable database. Users can browse the advertisements by decade and by county of origin, and the NCRSA website includes digital images of the ads, essays to address their historical context and interesting trends, full text transcripts, and an annotated bibliography to aid researchers.The advertisements are also fully keyword searchable. The advertisements were digitized from microfilm created by the North Carolina State Library and other sources. Staff members and student workers at UNCG and NC A&T scanned individual advertisements and then created transcripts and additional descriptive metadata.

NCRSA builds on the work of Freddie L. Parker (Stealing a Little Freedom: Advertisements for Slave Runaways in North Carolina, 1791-1840) and Lathan Windley (Runaway Slave Advertisements). A future enhancement will be the integration of this project with the preexisting Digital Library on American Slavery (http://library.uncg.edu/slavery/), based on the work of Dr. Loren Schweninger of UNCG, so that the two sites can be searched and browsed as one.

The project was funded through a 2011-2012 NC ECHO Digitization Grant. 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. The website is hosted by the UNCG Libraries’ Department of Electronic Resources and Information Technology.

For more information, please contact David Gwynn, digital projects coordinator for the UNCG University Libraries at 336.256.2606 or jdgwynn@uncg.edu.

Digital collections update

As we start the new academic year, it's time to unveil some new and expanded digital collections:

New collections:

• Greenhouse Cello Music Collection (Initial phase now complete)
  This collection features 230 items, including programs, annotated music scores, and album covers related to cellist Bernard Greenhouse, a revered performer and pedagogue known for his role as a founding member of the internationally renowned Beaux Arts Trio. We hope to expand this collection to include video and oral history materials in the coming months.
• Physical Education Pamphlets (Complete)
  This collection features 236 items created between 1838 and 1975 on such subjects as exercise and physical education, diet and nutrition, and health issues.
• WUAG Exhibit (Complete)
  This exhibit includes 136 photographs, documents, and other items from the records of UNCG's campus radio station that have been added to the University Archives digital collection. We will be adding audio and several interviews later this year.
  

Collections with significant additions:

• Greensboro Historical Newspapers (Initial phase now complete)
  This collection now includes all existing microfilmed issues (nearly 4000) of the Greensboro Patriot from 1826-1922 as well as a collection of World War II newspapers from Greensboro's ORD/BTC-10 army base. We have obtained copyright clearance to digitize the remaining issues of the Patriot and may do so if funding can be secured.
• The Carolinian, 1919-2008 (Complete)
  All existing issues (nearly 3000) of The Carolinian from 1919-2008 are now available online. Issues from 2008 to 2012 are currently being microfilmed and digitized and will be online soon. After that, we hope to add new issues at the end of each academic year.
  
• American Publishers Trade Bindings, Phase IV (Ongoing)
  Over 400 new items have been added in the past year.
• Oral History Collections (Ongoing)
  Approximately 60 new oral histories have been added since March, including 25 from the Rotary Club/Preserving Our History collection.
• Women Veterans Historical Project (Ongoing)
  Numerous oral histories, printed items, and photographs have been added.

Later this month, we will be unveiling the LSTA-funded North Carolina Runaway Slave Advertisements, 1751-1840 project, which contains around 2400 runaway slave ads that appeared in North Carolina newspapers in searchable full-text format.

We area also starting to work on Textiles, Teachers, and Troops: Greensboro NC, 1881-1945 and on the rest of year's roster of priority projects. More about these to follow:

• Manuscripts Scrapbooks
• American Publishers Trade Bindings, Phase V
• ASERL Center of Excellence for Nutrition: Government Documents Pamphlets
• Home Economics Pamphlets
• Greensboro Historical Newspapers, Phase II

Updates

There’s been a lot going on in Digital Projects the past couple of months. Here’s the rundown of what we’re currently working on and how far we've gotten on each project:

• American Publishers Trade Bindings Collection (Ongoing)
  We are actively working on the fourth phase of this collection, which involves completing all titles in the Woman's Collection and the detective fiction sub-collection. We also hope to work on some user interface enhancements in the spring, following our CONTENTdm upgrade. 
• Bernard Greenhouse Project (Completion target: Spring 2012)
  This project will make available concert programs, photographs, correspondence, manuscripts, and interviews pertaining to the noted cellist and will be the first in what we hope will be many projects highlighting our important cello collections. A graduate assistant us working with the Libraries and the UNCG LIS Department to complete this project as part of the Real Learning Connections program.
• The Carolinian, 1930-2005 (Completion target: 2012)
  Issues from 1919-1930 were published several months ago. The remainder have been digitized and assembled. We are currently working on integrating an index--a work in progress for several years--into the metadata for the project. This project was undertaken in collaboration with Lyrasis through a Sloan Foundation grant.
• Greensboro Patriot, 1826-1922 (Completion target: Spring 2012)
  We will be publishing online the full run of Greensboro's weekly "newspaper of record" from the nineteenth century. Severl test issues from the Civil War era are already online. All the rest have been digitized and are being prepared for publication online, as we assemble the PDF files for each issue and create metadata. We also plan to publish an index of the earlier issues that was created several years ago. This project was also undertaken in collaboration with Lyrasis through a Sloan Foundation grant, and is part of our plan for a larger community-focused local history portal in coming years.
• North Carolina Runaway Slave Ads Project (Completion target: Spring 2012)
  This project, funded through LSTA funds administered by the State Library's NC ECHO grant program, will digitize and transcribe more than two thousand runaway slave ads that appeared in North Carolina newspapers between 1730 and 1841. A collaborative venture with North Carolina A&T State University, this project is expected to be of great value to historians and genealogists. We have digitized a high proportion of the advertisements and are now transcribing and extracting metadata. Our colleagues at A&T will begin working on ads that were not part of our original source material in January. Three student assistants are currently working on the project.
• Physical Education Pamphlets Collection (Completion target: Spring 2012)
  These 400+ pamphlets held by the Martha Blakeney Hodges Special Collections and University Archives document physical education and related activities over the past 150 years. Scanning is complete on this massive project (over 6000 pages scanned) and the pamphlets will be published online probably by early spring.
• University Archives Scrapbooks (Likely completion in 2013)
  We are digitizing approximately 110 scrapbooks that are part of UNCG's University Archives and were completed by campus organizations from 1917 to 1993. This has been a challenging project and we have uncovered new issues on a daily basis, but there is a wealth of information contained in these books and making them available online will allow us to preserve the originals, most of which are in a very fragile state.
• University Images Project (Ongoing)
  The University Archives photo collections are being reprocessed to facilitate digitization and  the first (and probably most difficult) part of this reprocessing, the Buildings and Grounds series, is nearly complete. We will be adjusting some of the items already uploaded to the online collection to "match" their new homes in University Archives, which will make both the physical photos and their digital surrogates easier to find.
• Women Veterans Historical Project (Ongoing)
  This is one of our signature digital collections, and we are currently working primarily on oral history transcription. However, a bigger project that will move the entire collection from a homegrown database platform into CONTENTdm, which will allow for easier updating and increased searching and browsing capabilities.
• WUAG/Dead City Radio (Completion target: Spring 2012)
  This project will digitize Dead City Radio, a zine published from 1985 to present by UNCG's student radion station, along with other material from the WUAG records, including playlists, program schedules, photographs, and some audio materials. Work will beging in January and will involve a practicum student from the LIS program at UNCG.