Viewing entries tagged "use"

DigitalNC on the web: NC Hunt and Fish and the Outer Banks Fisherman

We love being sent or just stumbling upon, projects on the web that utilize materials digitized through the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center.  We thought since they have done such a great job highlighting us, it’d only be fair to turn around and highlight a few we’ve found recently.

Man standing in the ocean holding a fishing pole

We are still right in the middle of summer time here in North Carolina so it seems like a good time for another post on DigitalNC on the web featuring fishing.  This particular use of DigitalNC was figured out by the staff at the NCDHC due to web traffic analytics.  Last winter when we ran the numbers on our highest viewed items for 2018, we were surprised that a video of fishing was the second highest viewed item on our site in 2018. Specifically this film of Roland Martin, a well known fisherman fishing on the Outer Banks.  It is aptly titled, “Outer Banks Fisherman” and was digitized thanks to our partner the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  

We decided to do some digging into why that might be and stumbled upon a really great forum – NC Hunt and Fish. Someone on there had found the video and posted it – which promoted lots of excitement on the forum and drove lots of avid fishermen to our site to view it for themselves apparently!  The video itself is a fun look at sport fishing on the NC coast in the 1980s and the forum has lots of great memories of those who themselves used to go down to the Outer Banks to fish.

If you have a particular project or know of one that has utilized materials from DigitalNC, we’d love to hear about it!  Contact us via email or in the comments below and we’ll check out.  To see past highlighted projects, visit past posts here


How DigitalNC materials are being used across the web: History Unfolded Project at the US Holocaust Museum

We love being sent or just stumbling upon, projects on the web that utilize materials digitized through the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center.  We thought since they have done such a great job highlighting us, it’d only be fair to turn around and highlight a few we’ve found recently.

History Unfolded events page

The museum has selected various events from 1933-1945 for people to focus their research on finding articles about.

The History Unfolded: US Newspapers and the Holocaust  Project from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. is a project in which DigitalNC materials are just a small portion of a much bigger effort.  According to the project’s website “asks students, teachers, and history buffs throughout the United States what was possible for Americans to have known about the Holocaust as it was happening and how Americans responded. Participants look in local newspapers for news and opinion about 37 different Holocaust-era events that took place in the United States and Europe, and submit articles they find to a national database, as well as information about newspapers that did not cover events.”  The goal of the project is to build a crowd-sourced repository that scholars can use to better understand what those in the United States knew as the Holocaust was happening.  Digitized newspapers are a key component of the project and many of the papers we have digitized through DigitalNC have been used by participants of the project to track knowledge of Holocaust related events in local NC newspapers.  You can view everything that is from an NC newspaper here.  The earliest articles come from 1933, including an article from the Journal Patriot out of North Wilkesboro, NC that has the headline “A Dangerous Policy” regarding the Nazis’ growing policies against the Jewish people in Germany. 

screenshot of the History Unfolded Project

Article page on the History Unfolded project site showing an article from The Journal Patriot in 1933

The latest articles date to 1945 and focus on the evolving information being uncovered about the full extent of the Holocaust once the Nazis had been beaten in World War II.  As History Unfolded is a crowdsourced project you can get involved and help the museum continue to track this information in US newspapers.  To get involved yourself, visit here.     

If you have a particular project or know of one that has utilized materials from DigitalNC, we’d love to hear about it!  Contact us via email or in the comments below and we’ll check out.  To see past highlighted projects, visit past posts here


2018’s Most Popular Items on DigitalNC.org

Today we’re taking a look at the most-viewed items on DigitalNC.org for 2018. Yearbooks and newspapers are the most populous and popular items on our site, so it’s no surprise that they took four of the five slots. What rose to the top and why? Take a look below.

#1 Pertelote Yearbook, 1981

Contributing Institution: Brevard College

This year our most viewed single item on DigitalNC was the 1981 Pertelote yearbook from Brevard College.

The Pertelote was popular due to the apprehension of a mailbombing suspect in October of this year and his ties to several North Carolina schools. Cesar Sayoc was a student at Brevard College in the 1980s and his photograph can be found in several locations within the 1981 yearbook, including this club photo from page 134.

A group photo of ten members of the Brevard College Canterbury Club

#2 The Outer Banks Fisherman

Contributing Institution: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

On a lighter note, the second most popular item on our site was a film from the early 1980s entitled “The Outer Banks Fisherman.” It features Freshwater Bass Champion Roland Martin fishing on the Outer Banks. This film had a few particular days of internet popularity when it was mentioned on a couple of North Carolina hunting and fishing forums.

Man in a yellow slicker fishing on the beach, smoking a pipe

#3 North Wilkesboro Journal-Patriot Newspaper, December 8, 1941

Contributing Institution: Wilkes County Public Library

The third most popular single item on DigitalNC was the December 8, 1941 issue of the North Wilkesboro Journal-Patriot newspaper. You can tell from this striking headline that it was published the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor during World War II. This paper generally received referrals via Google all year, but we’re not sure which search terms were leading users to this page so consistently.

#4 The Franklin Press and Highlands Maconian Newspaper, April 23, 1953, page 9

Contributing Institution: Fontana Regional Library

Many of our referrals come from Facebook, and that was the case with this fourth most popular item. It was featured in the Facebook Group “You May Be From Franklin NC If…” The original poster stated that Group members had looked for photos of the Old County Home over the years, and that they had recently uncovered this newspaper page which includes pictures of the Home’s state in 1953. Top half of the april 23 1953 Franklin Press and Highlands Maconian, page 9

#5 The Daily Tar Heel Newspaper, September 2, 1986

Contributing Institution: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Facebook sharing also boosted this item’s rating, after the UNC-Chapel Hill University Archives asked for memories of the legal drinking age being raised to 21 in 1986 and the “send-0ff” on Franklin Street before the law came into effect. They shared a quote from a police officer as well as a link to the article below, which documents the damage and disgruntlement caused by the downtown party.

Top half of Daily Tar Heel front page from September 2, 1986, with photo of crowd on Franklin Street at night

 

Thanks for coming on our tour of the top DigitalNC items from this year. For the curious, we topped 4 million pageviews and 400K users in 2018! We’re looking forward to working with partners to share even more of North Carolina’s cultural heritage in 2019. 


DigitalNC on the Web: Genealogy blogs

Genealogists are probably our biggest users here at DigitalNC. We love the blog we’re highlighting today because it gives us some great insight into some of the finds one particular genealogist is making using DigitalNC.  Taneya Koonce is a fellow information science professional and also an avid genealogist.  On her personal blog, Taneya’s Genealogy Blog, she chronicles her work to trace her family’s history and the resources she uses to do so.  

Clipping from a genealogy blog about the connection of her family to Sylva, NC

A really great example of the way Ms. Koonce has used DigitalNC for her research is her post titled “And Now I Know Why” which shows how she traced why her great grandfather’s brother died in Sylva, NC, a place the family had not had any obvious connections to, which involved looking at yearbooks from Winston-Salem State University and their student newspaper, both of which can by found on Winston-Salem State University’s partner page.  

To see more posts about Ms. Koonce’s use of DigitalNC in her family history research, view all the posts tagged DigitalNC here.

If you have a particular project or know of one that has utilized materials from DigitalNC, we’d love to hear about it!  Contact us via email or in the comments below and we’ll check out.  To read about other places on the web that feature content from DigitalNC, check out past blog posts here.  

 


How DigitalNC materials are being used across the web: Legeros Fire Blog

We love hearing about ways that materials digitized through the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center have impacted research and recreation. We thought since they have done such a great job highlighting us, it’d only be fair to turn around and highlight a few we’ve found recently.  

Cover page of Raleigh Fire Department women's group scrapbook, features a firetruck illustration

Cover page of the Raleigh Fire Department Ladies’ Auxiliary 1968-1969 scrapbook, digitized for the Raleigh Fire Museum

 

Our focus today is a particularly fun one because the author of the blog is not only a heavy user of DigitalNC, but also our main contact for one of our partners, the Raleigh Fire Museum.  Mike Legeros’s Fire Blog provides a very detailed look into the history of fire departments in North Carolina, as well as keeping up to date on what’s going on in those departments today.  It also links to a Fire History page, which has resources of the history of fire departments across the country, including historic and present day photographs of fire stations.  

screenshot of city directory on the fire blog

We are particular fans of the post that explains in great detail how to use our city directories, which is one of our favorite resources on DigitalNC and one that Mike has used extensively in his research.  You can check out his tips and tricks here:  https://legeros.com/blog/burlington-and-graham-fire-alarm-box-locations-1920-21/ 

If you have a particular project or know of one that has utilized materials from DigitalNC, we’d love to hear about it!  Contact us via email or in the comments below and we’ll check out.  To read about other places on the web that feature content from DigitalNC, check out past blog posts here.  

 


How DigitalNC materials are being used across the web: Tornado Talk

We love hearing about ways that materials digitized through the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center have impacted research and recreation.  We thought since they have done such a great job highlighting us, it’d only be fair to turn around and highlight a few we’ve found recently.  

Photograph of damage from a tornado in Vaughn, NC

From the front page of the October 9, 1969 issue of the Warren Record

Today we’re focusing on a website that is on a very relevant topic to North Carolinians this time of year – the weather, and specifically, tornadoes.  It’s called Tornado Talk and according to the site itself, “Tornado Talk aims to be your #1 source for tornado history. Join us on this on-going project to compile a user friendly and interactive database with tornado summaries, personal accounts, and video productions of major tornado events.”  It is an incredibly in depth website and includes a calendar with tornado dates and each tornado that is focused on includes information about it’s path and links to primary sources about the destruction.  DigitalNC was featured in a recent post about a tornado that hit Vaughan, NC near Lake Gaston on October 2, 1969 and a paper we digitized, the Warren Record, featured articles about the destruction that followed in the tornado’s path.  To read more about the tornado and see the pages from the paper featured, check out Tornado Talk’s post here:

Vaughan-Lake Gaston, NC F2 Tornado – October 2, 1969

If you have a particular project or know of one that has utilized materials from DigitalNC, we’d love to hear about it!  Contact us via email or in the comments below and we’ll check out.  

 


North Carolina Yearbook Index

Yesterday, we learned that the North Carolina Yearbook Index, available on the popular and super-helpful genealogy site, NCGenWeb, now includes over 30,000 names.  Impressive!  Most of the yearbooks indexed have been digitized by the NC Digital Heritage Center for the North Carolina College and University Yearbooks project.

The index includes names, dates, and schools for the senior classes from more than 30 different institutions around the state.

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This blog is maintained by the staff of the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center and features the latest news and highlights from the collections at DigitalNC, an online library of primary sources from organizations across North Carolina.

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