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.
Today’s featured website is “Black Wide-Awake” which highlights “documents of historical and genealogical interest to researchers of Wilson County, North Carolina’s African American past.”
The site, written by Lisa Henderson and with posts dating back to 2015, utilizes a wide variety of digitized historical resources to document everything from African-American schools in the Wilson area, wills, correspondence, and newspaper articles related to the enslaved people in Wilson County, to official records including marriage, birth, and death records from the Black community.
Some of the DigitalNC resources that are featured on Black Wide-Awake include many of the photographs and other materials from the Oliver Nestus Freeman Round House Museum’s collection.
Shoe shine kit from the Oliver Nestus Freeman collection, featured in this post on Black Wide Awake.
Wilson City Directories
Photograph from the 1947-1948 Wilson City Directory, featured in this post on Black Wide Awake.
Senior page from the 1948 Charles H. Darden High School yearbook, the first yearbook from the school, featured in this post on the website.
Many newspaper article clippings from DigitalNC are also included. A post discussing the white supremacist views held and pushed by editor of the Wilson Advance, Josephus Daniels, is a recent post that connects directly to the current commentary going on regarding Black Lives Matter and reassessing how we look at our history.
Post on Black Wide Awake pointing out the racist statements the editor and publisher of the Wilson Advance, Josephus Daniels, made regularly in a call to take down any statue or other dedication marker to him in North Carolina.
The work done on this website is a fascinating look into how resources on DigitalNC can really help illuminate a North Carolina community’s past. Thanks for using us Ms. Henderson! We encourage anyone with an interest in genealogy and local history, particularly for the Black community in North Carolina, to visit the site.
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.
It’s DigitalNC.org’s 10th birthday! Though we had hoped to be in the office celebrating, we’re still taking time to look back at years of hard work and the collaborative spirit that makes the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center (NCDHC) what it is!
To date, NCDHC has partnered with 273 libraries, museums, alumni associations, archives, and historic sites in 98 of North Carolina’s 100 counties and we’re growing all the time. Our website currently includes 4.2 million images and files. We share this accomplishment with every institution we’ve worked with. We’d never have gotten to 10 years without staff (permanent, temporary, and student!), our partners, or the network of colleagues all over North Carolina who have encouraged, advised, and supported our work.
As we approached our anniversary, we realized that our website lacked a synopsis of how NCDHC came to be, and our history. So read on for a brief look at how we got started and our major milestones.
Our History
The North Carolina Digital Heritage Center was one outcome of a comprehensive effort by the state’s Department of Cultural Resources (now the Department of Natural and Cultural Resources) to survey and get a broad overview of the status of North Carolina cultural heritage institutions. That effort was entitled NC ECHO (North Carolina Exploring Cultural Heritage Online) and was funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (which also supports us – thanks IMLS). A major goal of NC ECHO was a multi-year needs assessment. NC ECHO staff visited hundreds of cultural heritage institutions throughout the state to collect data and interview curators, librarians, volunteers, archivists, and more. Many of our partners still remember their visits!
Data collected at these site visits was combined with survey responses to reveal a “state of the state,” summarized in a 2010 report, cover pictured at right. The assessment revealed a lot but, specific to digitization, staff found that nearly three-quarters of the 761 institutions who completed the survey had no digitization experience or capacity. Members of the Department of Cultural Resources (which includes the State Library, State Archives, and multiple museums and historic sites) began brainstorming with other area institutions about a way to help efficiently and effectively provide digitization opportunities. While the NC ECHO project offered digitization grants, workshops, and best practices, an idea emerged of a centralized entity that could assist institutions that didn’t have the capacity to do the work in house. The State Library of North Carolina and UNC-Chapel Hill Libraries joined together to create such an entity: the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center. The Center would be located in Chapel Hill, taking advantage of its central location and the digitization equipment and expertise already available in Wilson Special Collections Library. The State Library would provide funding, guidance, and ongoing promotion and support of the Center’s services.
At its beginning, the Center’s staff digitized small collections of college yearbooks, needlework samplers, postcards, and photographs and made them available through DigitalNC.org. They went to speak with organizations interested in becoming partners, and began taking projects for digitization. Here’s a list of NCDHC’s earliest partners, who came on board during late 2009 and 2010.
Though we’re not positive of the exact date, we believe DigitalNC.org launched on or near May 12, 2010. Here’s a look at that original site!
In 2011, word about the Center spread. Staff started responding to demand from partners, incorporating newspaper digitization. In late 2012, also in response to popular demand, the Center began digitizing high school yearbooks. Yearbooks and newspapers are some of the most viewed items on DigitalNC, and they remain a significant portion of our work to this day.
In 2013, NCDHC joined the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) as North Carolina’s “service hub.” The DPLA collects information from digitized collections all over the nation and provides it together in one searchable interface at dp.la. Because of our participation, users can browse and search for collections from North Carolina alongside items from institutions around the country.
Throughout the years, we’ve tried to expand services to fit our partners’ goals. In 2015, we trialed an audiovisual digitization project that incorporated the first films into DigitalNC. Today, we partner with the Southern Folklife Collection at Wilson Special Collections Library to provide audio digitization on an ongoing basis. In 2016, we added a new partner category – alumni associations – to support more digitization of African American high school yearbooks and memorabilia. The following year, we announced a focus on digitization of items documenting underrepresented communities. We also started going on the road with our scanners! For institutions that don’t have the staff time or resources to travel to Chapel Hill, we offer to come for a day or two and scan on site.
2018 and 2019 saw several major milestones. We were nationally recognized as an Institute of Museum and Library Services National Medal finalist, and we began a major software migration. Both were a tribute to the size and extent of our operation, though in different ways. As we’ve approached our 10th anniversary we’ve focused on working with partners in all 100 of North Carolina’s counties. Whether you’re rural or metropolitan, we believe your history is important and should be shared online.
One of the ways we’re commemorating this anniversary is to ask our partners and stakeholders how they think we’ve impacted them and their audiences. Join us here on the blog in the second half of 2020 as we share these brief interviews, reflect, and celebrate. Thank you for reading, enjoy the site, and here’s to another 10 years of making North Carolina’s cultural heritage accessible online!
We’ve taken a look back at this year’s top 5 most viewed items on DigitalNC, and they may not be what you expect! Here they are in order of popularity.
The most viewed single item on DigitalNC was this photo:
Want to know more about Madison Beach? We did, and found this page in a Rockingham County Public Library volume by local author John T. Dallas to help us out.
This picture of Jim Thornton and his band includes Congressman Harold D. Cooley and singer Mozelle Phillips. The band played at dances and events, as well as on the radio and a live country music television show out of Raleigh entitled “Saturday Night Country Style.”
From the 1880s, this postcard shows the bridge spanning Contentnea Creek in Wilson County, with “Wiggin’s Mill” and the reservoir waterfall in the background. Wiggin’s Mill was a sawmill, and can be found in newspapers of that era as a local landmark both on land and on the creek. The Wilson Advancedescribes the Wiggin’s Mill bridge floating away in a “freshet” in June 1891.
Taken together, yearbooks are the most popular items available on our site. It’s not surprising that one made the top 5 list. This 1976 Yackety Yack has spectacular photographs with 1970s style.
For the curious, here are some overall numbers for DigitalNC for 2017. Here’s looking forward as we work with partners to share even more of North Carolina’s cultural heritage in 2018!
Thanks to the Wilson County Public Library, a decade of Annual Announcements from the Book Club of Wilson are now available on DigitalNC!
Book Clubs are not a new trend and these items prove it! Domestic book clubs originated in England during the 18th century, as women pushed for intellectual autonomy (Heller). The Book Club of Wilson began in 1898 with a group of women who selected readings for monthly discussion. They met in each others’ homes and discussed about half a dozen pieces each month. Dating from 1901-1911, these announcements cover a variety of topics, including Shakespeare, U.S. social issues, and romance in Scotland.
These resources could be useful for researchers interested in women’s education in the early twentieth century, especially outside of the traditional school system. They could also be a fun project or starting point for beginning a book club of your own!
You can see all of the Book Club Annual Announcements at the links below:
In addition to the book club announcements, Wilson County Public Library also contributed a copy of a baseball Score Card from 1923. This booklet contains photographs and advertisements centering on baseball in Wilson County during the early 1920’s.
Camp members faithfully recorded their activities, changes in membership, as well as the passing of many of their Camp members. There are also several documents related to the national United Confederate Veterans organization. Especially of interest to genealogists are 11 sheets containing the “Record of Lineal Descendants of Confederate Soldiers,” collected in 1918 by a Wilson chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy.
You can view all items from Wilson County Public Library here.
Ten years of yearbooks from Charles H. Darden High School in Wilson, NC are now available on DigitalNC. Covering the time period between 1948 and 1969, the yearbooks show life at the African-American high school. The class of 1970 was Darden High School’s last class. In the years following through 1978 it was a 10th grade only school.
Boy Scouts at the Tobacco Festival Parade in the 1940s
Advertisement for Boy Scout Week from the Hoke County News-Journal, February 1943
It’s National Boy Scout Week, and DigitalNC has some great boy scout-related materials from several contributing institutions. Read about boy scouting activities in Raeford, N.C. from the 1940s-1960s in issues of The News-Journal, or check out this photograph of boy scouts from the Wilson County Public Library.
“On Dec 7, 1941, my mother was driving to the old Wilson Country Club when a news bulletin came on the radio announcing the shocking news that Pearl Harbor had been bombed. Mother drove directly out on the golf course to find my father to tell him what had happened and told all the golfers that she passed driving down the fairways the grim news.”
“I so well remember December 7, 1941, a Sunday. I went to the movie and around 5:00 pm when I came home, my mother said Pearl Harbor had been attacked and destroyed. She said it meant war with the Japanese. She had tears in her eyes, and I knew what she was thinking.”
The memories in the Wilson County’s Greatest Generation exhibit are shared by the Wilson County Public Library.
I thought the carts and wagons you often see hitched behind horses in old photos and postcards were pretty simple contraptions. That was until I saw the Hackney Brothers Body Company catalogue of prints, probably published in the late 19th or early 20th century. The catalog shows a variety of models and options comparable to what you find in a modern car dealership. If I was shopping for myself, I think I’d go with the Full Panel Top Delivery Wagon, pictured below.
The Hackney Brothers company, based in Wilson, N.C., showed an impressive ability to adapt to the changing times. They went from producing horse-drawn ice wagons to becoming a leading manufacturer of refrigerated trucks. The company remained active and locally owned under the Hackney Brothers name until the 1990s.
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.
