This is an archival post originally published on December 12, 2014.
More North Carolina libraries, museums, and archives will soon be sharing their treasures online, thanks to a $75,000 grant to the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center, based in UNC’s Wilson Library.
The grant from the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation brings the Center into the DPLA’s Digital Hubs Pilot Project. As a digital hub, the Center will collaborate with cultural heritage institutions across the state to digitize materials from their collections, publish them online, and ensure that they become part of the DPLA.
The Center has been performing these functions as a service hub for the DPLA since October 2013. In that time, it has helped to bring a quarter-million scans and images from more than 160 North Carolina institutions into the DPLA.
“This grant is a wonderful vote of confidence in the high-quality work of the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center,” said UNC University Librarian Sarah Michalak.
Nick Graham, the Center’s program coordinator, said he routinely hears from university and public libraries, community colleges, and museums in North Carolina who would like to share their collections online.
Because archival-quality digitization is so costly, most of these items would never be seen beyond the local community if it were not for the partnership between participating institutions and the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center. This grant, combined with ongoing support from the State Library of North Carolina, enables the Center to provide these services at no charge to the contributing libraries.
“These are richly informative and frequently unique collections that shed light on North Carolina history and culture,” said Graham. “Adding them to the DPLA, alongside records from the Smithsonian Institution, the New York Public Library, and the Getty Institution amplifies their reach and value.”
Graham said the new grant will enable the Center to hire temporary staff, increase the volume of work it can take on, and build new partnerships. Among the projects in the pipeline thanks to the new grant are:
- historic high school yearbooks from Caldwell, Johnston, and Richmond counties
- scrapbooks and photographs from the Oliver Nestus Freeman Round House Museum in Wilson, which documents the culture and contributions of the local African American community
- student newspapers from Gardner-Webb University in Boiling Springs
- mid-twentieth-century photographs that show farming practices in Rocky Mount
The North Carolina Digital Heritage Center based at UNC’s Wilson Library scans heritage materials from North Carolina libraries, museums, and archives, and makes them available online.
