The Wayne County Public Library has provided three more scrapbooks for digitization. These scrapbooks feature local baseball player Bobby Wilson throughout his time playing for the Baltimore Orioles (1948), Toronto Maple Leafs (1953-1954), and Indianapolis Indians (1952). Mr. Wilson was born in Goldsboro, North Carolina, but he played baseball all over the country during his career.
“Bobbing Bobby” Wilson
A hit by Bobby Wilson drives a run in
Wayne County Public Library has provided a number of scrapbooks about Bobby Wilson in the past, as well as other baseball players and teams. For more information about Mr. Wilson and his career, see these previous blog posts, and for more information and to view the other materials from Wayne County Public Library, visit their contributor page.
Bobby Wilson, 1950
An additional scrapbook documenting the life and career of Minor League Baseball player Bobby Wilson has been added to DigitalNC. From the Wayne County Public Library, this scrapbook covers 1950-1951, during which Wilson played for the San Diego Padres. It includes newspaper clippings as well as a couple of photographs.
This scrapbook joins several earlier scrapbooks about Wilson, as well as a number of other scrapbooks from the same Library that document local baseball players.
View all materials from Wayne County Public Library on DigitalNC.
Four new scrapbooks have been digitized and uploaded from the Wayne County Public Library. These scrapbooks follow the career of Bobby Wilson (full name Robert Monroe Wilson) as he played baseball for three baseball teams, the Wilkes-Barre Barons (in 1945 and 1946), the Baltimore Orioles, and the San Diego Padres.
Newspaper clippings from Wilson’s time with the Orioles
Although he played baseball around the country, Bobby Wilson was born in Goldsboro, North Carolina. He played second base and shortstop, and many newspaper clippings discuss Wilson’s speed and his ability to steal bases. As seen in the image above, his base running skills occasionally played a big role in his team’s performance.
Cartoons depicting Bobby Wilson’s base running abilities
The Wayne County Public Library has contributed a number of other scrapbooks pertaining to baseball and local baseball players. To browse all of the material Wayne County Public Library has contributed, you can visit their contributor’s page.
We are one of 29 finalists for the Institute of Museum and Library Services 2018 National Medal for Museum and Library Service. Now through April 13, IMLS is asking the people who have been impacted by the Digital Heritage Center to share their stories. If you have a story you’d like to share, we’d love to hear from you! Please contact us or share via social media by tagging us on Facebook (@NC Digital Heritage Center) or on Twitter (@ncdhc).
Today’s story comes from Professor Robert C. Allen, Professor in the Department of American Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill and faculty lead of the Community Histories Workshop. Dr. Allen shared the thoughts below in support of our Medal application and we reshare them today with his permission.
Textile Workers Marching in Gastonia, NC, 1929. From the Gaston County Museum of Art & History
“Since 2013, I have been working closely with the N.C. Digital Heritage Center on ‘Digital Loray,’ the most ambitious public humanities program ever undertaken by UNC. This project uses the adaptive reuse of an iconic industrial structure—in this case, Gastonia’s Loray Mill, one of the largest cotton mills built in the state—as a catalyst for a long-term community history and archiving initiative. The ‘heart of this open-ended project is an archive of more than 2500 digital objects, brought together in a single interface from the UNC North Carolina Collection and other Wilson Library collections, other institutional archives, community cultural heritage organizations, churches, and individual community contributors.
“The NC Digital Heritage Center was absolutely instrumental in our ability to undertake this kind of deeply collaborative community history work. It worked with the Gaston County Museum of Art and History—the primary cultural heritage organization in the county—to identify, digitize, and publish material from its collection that could be ‘added’ to Digital Loray. Three community members had saved many documents, photographs, maps, mementos, and other material from the mill at the time of its closing in 1993. Working with the N.C. Digital Heritage Center, we encouraged them to donate this material to the Gaston County Museum of Art and History, which, in turn, allowed the center to facilitate the digitization and publication of these unique artifacts…
“In short, I could not extend my teaching, graduate training, and the work of my unit into communities in North Carolina without the invaluable assistance of the N.C. Digital Heritage Center. But I am not the most important beneficiary of its effectiveness and leadership: it enables hundreds of small museums, public libraries, historical societies, and other cultural heritage organizations to add a digital dimension to their work and, in doing so, to preserve and share the histories of their communities. These perennially threatened local organizations can undertake what otherwise would be impossibly expensive and technically complex digitization projects without the need for technical specialists or third-party software and hosting solutions.
“The N.C. Digital Heritage Center should be a model for other states. It deserves much more attention on a national level than it has received, particularly in the realms of public history, digital history, public humanities, and digital humanities. I have reviewed and attended presentations about ‘sexier’ and much better resourced projects over the past few years, but none I think has had a greater or longer-lasting impact than the quiet but profoundly important work of my colleagues in the N.C. Digital Heritage Center. I congratulate them and thank them for all they do to make my university a great resource for the people of North Carolina.
