Vintage Viands: Last Call!

Vintage Viands offers opportunities for students, staff, and the local community to sample foods from an earlier era, and reflect on how taste and ingredients change over time. The event, connected through the Home Economics Pamphlets Collection and the Home Economics and Household Collection, offers attendees an online or physical exhibit. 

This year, Vintage Viands is honored to receive the University Libraries' Innovation Grant to support the promotion of the event itself and of the collection. See: 2016-17 Libraries’ Innovation Grant will Showcase Home Economics Pamphlets for more details!

No tickets are needed; ticket link will take you to more information about the event.

University Libraries staff are invited to contribute vintage dishes; there will be prizes and it is possible to be reimbursed for the cost of ingredients. Here's how:

• Choose a recipe from the digital collection or from this guide which also contains link to print materials.
• Submit your recipe.
• Volunteer to help with the event.

Join us on Friday, September 23, 2016 as we recreate the tastes of the 1920's!

More information here...

This year's Vintage Viands theme

Mark your calendars! Vintage Viands will take place this year on Friday, September 23, 2016, from noon to 2:00 pm. Last year's 1940s theme was so much fun! 

This year, we would like your input on the theme. If you have a UNCG login, please fill out our poll! You can pick one of the ideas that we have provided, or you can write in your own. If you are on campus, you can also swing by the library and cast a paper ballot across from the reference desk. 

Vintage Viands is a taste-testing event put on by Digital Projects and Special Collections that promotes our Home Economics Pamphlets Collection. There are a number of pamphlets digitized online and several more housed in Special Collections. Faculty and staff in the library pick a recipe based on the year's theme and make it as close to the original recipe as we are able. It's a fun way to see how recipes and taste have changed throughout the years! 

Hope to see you in September!

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.

New digital collections

The Digital Projects team announces the debut of several new digital collections:

• Charles Duncan McIver Records
  This collection makes available the papers of UNCG's founder and first president, largely in their entirety. Comprising over 123,000 pages of material, the McIver Records document the founding and early years of the North Carolina State Normal and Industrial School (now UNCG) and include material on early construction, the typhoid epidemic, and the fire that destroyed Brick Dormitory. This collection was digitized as part of the larger Textiles, Teachers, and Troops grant project funded through an LSTA grant administered by the North Carolina State Library.
• Robert Watson Papers
  The Robert W. Watson Manuscripts date from 1948 to 1980 and contain manuscripts, typescripts, publisher's proofs and galleys, clippings, correspondence, photographs, and reviews. Watson was the main architect of UNCG's Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program, considered one of the best in the nation. The Watson Papers have been digitized almost in their entirety (nearly 6000 pages of material); several folders were skipped due to copyright concerns. 
• Home Economics, Food, and Nutrition Pamphlets Collection
  The Home Economics and Nutrition Pamphlets Collection consists of government and commercial publications on the subject of home management and nutrition and include educational materials, recipes, household hints, and other materials. The digital collection was built from resources held in the Martha Blakeney Hodges Special Collections and University Archives and the University Libraries Government Documents Collection. All materials are presumed to be in the public domain. The Government Documents portion of the collection was digitized as UNCG's contribution to the ASERL Centers of Excellence Program. Additional materials will be added in subsequent phases.

More new collections will be announced next week.

Home Economics Pamphlets Collection grows

Approximately seventy-five new pamphlets have been added to the Home Economics, Food, and Nutrition Pamphlets digital collection. Offering everything from recipes to household hints to instructions on how to use your new refrigerator, this collection is definitely one of the most colorful and fun projects we've worked with in Digital Projects.

Phase One, completed last year, included around sixty pre-1923 pamphlets, while this year's group dates from 1923 to 1977. The pamphlets are being presented as part of a larger digital collection that also includes more than five hundered government-issued pamphlets on food and nutrition that were digitized as part of the ASERL Centers of Excellence program.

2013-14 Digital Project Priorities

In June, the Digital Projects Priorities Team met to assess this year's project proposals and came up with the following list of projects in order of priority:

1. Textiles, Teachers, and Troops Year 2:
   This is the second year of a two-year LSTA-funded project documenting the history of Greensboro from Reconstruction to World War II.
2. Class of 1951 to present:
   Encompassing approximately 25,000 digital images, this project will make available the subject files that have been compiled on each graduating class since 1951. The files through 1950 have already been digitized as part of Textiles, Teachers, and Troops. 
3. UNCG Creative Writing:
   This project will digitize the Robert Watson and Randall Jarrell Papers (approximately 15,000 items) as  a pilot project for the for next phase of North Carolina Literary Map. 
4. Home Economics Pamphlets:
   This is the second year of a project to digitize public domain pamphlets from this collection, this phase mostly dating from 1923-1963.
5. Lois Lenski Pilot:
   This project will digitize several children's books from the Lois Lenski Papers as a pilot for a larger project and as a means of testing some new equipment in the unit. 
6. Music Recital Programs:
   This will make avilable some five hundred born-digital programs for recitals held in the UNCG School of Music and is envisioned as a way to provide easy reference access to recordings held in the Harold Schiffman Music Library. 
7. Music and Theatre Productions Materials, 1897-1963:
   Encompassing some 20,000 digital images, this collection will provide access to programs and other production information for musical and stage performances held at what is now The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. 
8. Ege Project:
   This project will involve digitizing one hundred pages from medieval manuscripts purchased as a set by UNCG in the 1950s. Other institutions have sets drawn from these same manuscripts and it is hoped that some day they can be reconnected digitally.
9. American Publishers Trade Bindings, Phase 6:
   This will complete the one hundred or so items that have not yet been digitized for this project. The Digital Projects Priorities Team may consider a later proposal to expand the project.

In addition, we will continue work on the Oral History Collections and Women Veterans Historical Project.

Some important notes: The projects are in priority order; we hope to complete all nine, but those higher on the list stand a greater chance of being completed in their entirety during this academic year. Budget issues and issues with the collections themselves can impact our progress dramatically.

And one final reminder: The Digital Projects Unit has four priority focus areas based on our collection strengths. Projects outside these areas will still be considered but those that fall inside the four areas are given priority. The four areas are:

1. University history
2. Local and regional history
3. Women's history
4. Performing arts

We're excited to get rolling on this year's projects! Watch this space for updates.

Digital collections update

The Digital Projects team would like to announce some new additions to our digital collections as of this week:

Home Economics and Nutrition Pamphlets

Fifty-nine items from the Home Economics Pamphlets Collection of the Martha Blakeney Hodges Special Collections and University Archives have been made available on the project website, with many more to follow in the coming year. These pamphlets present a rich visual and textual picture of everyday life in the American home from the turn of the Twentieth Century through the 1950s and were produced by a variety of government and commercial sources.

This collection will also include materials both from the food and nutrition subject area of the University Libraries' Government Documents Collections. The latter group is being digitized as part of the ASERL Centers of Excellence Program and will be added to the digital collection later this summer.

American Publishers Trade Bindings, Phase V

The fifth phase of this project includes some four hundred bindings from the Special Collections General and Early Juvenile collections of the Martha Blakeney Hodges Special Collections and University Archives and demonstrate the artistic and technological aspects of binding and book arts through the early years of the Twentieth Century. These items have a tremendous visual interest and will be of great value both to researchers and casual lovers of books and graphic design.