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,

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!

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.

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!

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

Scrapbooks Collection Online

We're excited to announce that the University Archives Scrapbooks Collection is now available online as part of the University Archives digital collection. This two-year project is one of the largest in-house projects Digital Projects has completed to date, with over 23,000 individual scans representing 236 scrapbooks. The scrapbooks were originally created by groups and departments affiliated with UNCG and its predecessors, including dormitories, student groups, and academic units. An additional project, scheduled for completion next year, will digitize another group of scrapbooks created by individuals and by groups that were not necessarily affiliated with UNCG.

The scrapbooks presented some unique challenges with respect to display and description. Since many pages had multipage items (e,g. programs, letter, etc.) attached to them, we devised a hierarchical display convention that shows the full-page scan and also allows the user to explore the individual items that were attached to that page. The items were described and made accessible through a metadata plan that involved a collaboration between staff members from Digital Projects, Cataloging, and the Martha Blakeney Hodges Special Collections and University Archives.  We have completed several presentations and one publication about the process.

We have featured some individual items on the Digital Projects Facebook page (including our discovery of the so-called "archival peanut") and will continue to post there and on the University Archives and Digital Projects Twitter feeds.

In addition to David Gwynn, Digital Projects Coordinator, the project team included:

• Rob Bixby, Digitization Technician
• Kyle Butler, Student Assistant
• Olivia Carlisle, Student Assistant
• Ronunda Claiborne, Student Assistant
• Callie Coward, Monographic Special Collections Cataloging Assistant
• Anna Craft, Metadata Cataloger
• Amanda Fonorow, Student Assistant
• Scott Hinshaw, Archives Technician
• Jacey Kepich, Student Assistant
• Erin Lawrimore, University Archivist
• Kathelene McCarty Smith, Artifacts, Textiles, Digital Projects Archivist
• Erica Rau, Digitization and Metadata Technician
• Michael Reeder, Support/ERIT Projects Technician
• Rachel Stas, Student Assistant
• Hermann Trojanowski, Special Projects Archivist

Carnegie Library Scrapbook, 1936-1944

Reading Room, Carnegie Library, Woman's College of the University of North Carolina, late 1930s

We're really excited to get this scrapbook online because it speaks so directly to our own history here in the University Libraries. The Carnegie Library opened in 1905 in what is now the Forney Building. The building was partially destroyed by fire on September 15, 1932, and was enlarged during its reconstruction. The Library reopened in 1933 and vacated this building in 1950, when a new facility, now part of Jackson Library, opened across College Avenue. In 1955, Forney Building was extensively renovated for classroom use and in 1957 was named for Edward Jacob Forney, the school treasurer and chair of the Commercial Department from 1892 to 1940.

Greensboro was unusual in that it had within its current city limits  four different Carnegie Libraries associated with four different institutions: one each at Woman's College (now UNCG), Bennett College, and Guilford College, and one serving as the Greensboro Public Library. All but the Greensboro Public Library building are still standing and Guilford's building is still serving as part of the Hege Library.

The scrapbook contains clippings, photographs, and other material and is a great time capsule of a college library in the late 1930s and early 1940s. It was digitized as part of a three-year project that will make over 300 scrapbooks available online.

Scrapbooks going online

The Digital Projects team is beginning to place the first items from the University Archives Scrapbooks Collection online. This two-year project involved scanning 239 scrapbooks, resulting in over 23,000 digital images (over 600 GB of material) and this final stage of the project will place them all online is the University Archives digital collection. The scrapbooks were created by university departments, student organizations, residence halls, and other groups affiliated with the university and document the first century of UNCG's history and culture in a very visual manner. The scrapbooks contain photographs, clippings, and ephemera ranging from ribbons and ticket stubs to a peanut in a dress.

As of Monday, forty items are online. More will be added in the next few weeks. The scrapbooks can be seen here and you can also subscribe to follow the updates as they happen.

In the library

In celebration of National Library Week, a few photos from UNCG's old Carnegie Library (now Forney Building) that were recently removed from a scrapbook, repaired by the library's preservation team, and digitized for an upcoming project.

Circa 1936

Recreational reading room, April, 1938

Books arriving for a library contest, April, 1938

The Carnegie Library scrapbook and photos will be available online in a few months as part of two larger projects presenting historical photographs of UNCG and scrapbooks held in the Martha Blakeney Hodges Special Collections and University Archives.

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

Freshman Week, 1931

Freshman Week was held in mid-September, 1931, on the campus of the North Carolina College for Women (now The University of North Carolina at Greensboro) and was roughly comparable to the SOAR events which are happening on campus right now, providing an orientation to the campus and opportunities to consult with individual academic departments and campus groups. 

 

This booklet, published by The Carolinian, included a welcome to 450 incoming freshmen and some notes on "campus standards" reminding students to use sidewalks and trash cans and "to be especially quiet until 7:00 o'clock in the morning on week days and until nine on Sundays."

In 2012, the Digital Projects team also welcomes incoming freshmen but we prefer to stress the importance of recycling bins over trash cans.

The items from this post are taken from MSS88, the Margaret Catherine Moore Papers, and are part of an ongoing scrapbook digitization project that will be available for use next year.

Campus Construction, ca. 1949

We found this interesting article while working on the Class of 1950 Scrapbook as part of the University Archives Scrapbook Collection. It details several construction projects on the Woman's College (Now UNCG) campus around 1949. Included are the original building of what is now Jackson Library, Ragsdale-Mendenhall residence halls, and the Home Economics Building (now Stone).

The article notes that the new $1,000,000 library building, which would open in 1950, "is designed to hold 300,000 books, about double the capacity of the present library" and goes on to discuss "the three soundproof audio-visual rooms" and the auditorium (now called Randall Jarrell Hall). The library was to have closed stacks, just like the Carnegie Library it replaced, but was expected to have a "much wider selection of general books, reference books, and periodicals" in open shelving.

There is also a discussion of the new dormitory, the interior of which was modeled after the already-built Weil-Winfield residence hall and of the many features of the new Home Economics building, which was a significant expansion of the existing building. Noteworthy were the new food storage facilities, the "air conditioned auditorium equipped for movies and television" and the textile research laboratories.

The last section discusses plans for the new infirmary (now Gove Student Health Center), the student union (now Elliott University Center), and additions to what is now the Petty Building. Noted modernist architect Edward Loewenstein was also working on plans for a gymnasium addition.

The early 1950s were obviously something of a building boom at UNCG.

Related:

• More photos of campus buildings, grounds, and views
• The Carolinian

Ms. Peanut

I think this is a first. We just scanned a 74-year-old peanut in a dress. It's part of the University Archives Scrapbooks Collection, which we're digitizing this year.

Scrapbooks are always interesting candidates for scanning. They're an incredible source of social history and can provide a wealth of information about the way their "keepers" lived. In this case, the scrapbook in question was created by the State Normal and Industrial College Class of 1917. There are notes, clippings, photographs, and lots of random (and hard to identify) things made out of crepe paper and streamers.

Scrapbooks are also something of a logistical nightmare, alas. They tend to be extremely fragile--at best--and many are literally crumbling in our hands as we try to find the most gentle method of reproducing them. Documents are pasted onto other documents: folded, stacked, and inserted into envelopes. Every day brings a new challenge and we'll be writing about some of them in this space.

I thought the peanut deserved its very own post, though.

Update: That should read "a 94-year-old peanut" rather than "a 74-year-old peanut." In my younger days, I used to be able to add...