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DigitalNC on the web: Black Wide-Awake

Posted on July 22, 2020 by Kristen Merryman

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

black and white photograph of two adults picking cotton in a field

Photograph from the 1947-1948 Wilson City Directory, featured in this post on Black Wide Awake.

Yearbooks from Darden High School, made possible by our partner Wilson County Public Library

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.

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

Posted on August 7, 2019 by Kristen Merryman

moving images NCDHC Impact use

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.

How DigitalNC materials are being used across the web: Bull City 150

Posted on April 13, 2019 by Kristen Merryman

NCDHC Impact

Black and white photograph of a house with a porch

1 Adams Alley, a house torn down during Urban Renewal in Durham. Adams Alley no longer exists as an address.

Today’s focus is on a website that’s associated with larger project at Duke called Bull City 150. Durham celebrates it’s 150th anniversary this month, so it feels appropriate to highlight this project in April. According to the website, “the mission of Bull City 150 is to invite Durhamites to reckon with the racial and economic injustices of the past 150 years and commit to building a more equitable future.” The project does this through a variety of public history methods, including the associated website that features several videos put together by students in Documentary Studies classes at Duke. Two of those videos, one on the important role of the Carolina Times and its’ long time editor, Louis Austin in Durham’s Black community, and one on the destruction of Hayti in Durham when the Durham Freeway, Hwy 147, was built, feature materials digitized by DigitalNC. We have the full run of the Carolina Times available here and many photographs and property surveys digitized for the Durham Urban Renewal Collection from our partner Durham County Library, are featured in the Hayti video.

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

Posted on March 13, 2019 by Kristen Merryman

NCDHC Impact use

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.

DigitalNC on the Web: Genealogy blogs

Posted on December 20, 2018 by Kristen Merryman

NCDHC Impact use

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.

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

Posted on November 16, 2018 by Kristen Merryman

NCDHC Impact use

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.

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

Posted on October 23, 2018 by Kristen Merryman

NCDHC Impact newspapers use

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.

Partners Share Their Stories: Watauga County Public Library in Boone

Posted on April 11, 2018 by Lisa Gregory

NCDHC Impact news

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 Ross Cooper, Adult Services and Reference Librarian at Watauga County Public Library. We’ve worked with Watauga County Public Library to digitize a wide variety of photographs from their “Historic Boone” collection. They have steadily increased their local capacity for digitization and now make collections available to a broader audience at Digital Watauga.

Close up of around 30 boys and girls of elementary school age in a group, all facing the camera

Boone Elementary School Students, 1913 (Detail), Shared by Watauga County Public Library

“As a Reference Librarian at the Watauga County Public Library in Boone, North Carolina, I was fortunate to have been present when, with the help of the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center, our institution became first involved with historic preservation and digitization. A local group called Historic Boone wished to bequeath the historic images which their group had gathered, described, and cared for over several decades into the caretaking of our library, some ten years ago. Our then-County Librarian accepted the items and made a space for them. I was privileged at about the same time to attend a North Carolina Library Association annual conference presentation in which Nick Graham and Lisa Gregory of the University of North Carolina and the State Library of North Carolina presented on the ways that small public libraries and other institutions with limited resources might take some small steps towards preservation, scanning, and digitized sharing of materials within their collections which hold historical significance. This led us to a few small first attempts, including a blog-format web site with a few, piecemeal, scanned images. The offer of off-site digitization by the NC Digital Heritage Center which was additionally presented at this conference eventually led our library to transport the entire photograph archives of the Historic Boone society to the University of North Carolina to be digitized and shared online via www.digitalnc.org.

“The wide-spread community interest engendered by this undertaking and by the readily-accessible web presence was followed by the successful application by our new Regional Director for an EZ Digitization grant funded by the Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA). The NC Digital Heritage Center provided invaluable support, advice, and encouragement as we used this generous funding opportunity to purchase scanning and computing equipment and to fund a year-long temporary part-time position for a digitization technician. Our community was fortunate at this time to have a historian, Dr. Eric Plaag, move to our area and immediately begin actively and tirelessly working with our town, our library, and the local historical society on a number of projects involving preservation and dissemination of historical material. With his generously-volunteered expert advice, the steps which we had undertaken thanks to the NC Digital Heritage Center have now taken root and grown into a locally-based initiative, Digital Watauga, which is a cooperative venture between the Watauga County Historical Society and the Watauga County Public Library. Other local organizations, including the Junaluska Heritage Association, representing our county’s oldest historically African American community, and numerous interested individuals, have contributed to making this new and growing effort a success, on behalf of all of our area’s people. It was only through the expertise, assistance, and support of the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center that any of this work ‘left the ground’! As just one small portion – perhaps the small, rugged, mountainous, Northwestern portion – of the vast array of resources which have been preserved and shared by NC Digital heritage – the strides which we have made in saving and sharing our local history are a testament to the greater work which this institution has done throughout our state, an effort which extends far beyond our local area and our state’s boundaries. I cannot highly enough express my appreciation, personally and as a community member, and I sincerely and heartily endorse the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center as a perfect exemplar of the ideas and ideals which are recognized by the IMLS National Medal for Museum and Library Service.”

Partners Share Their Stories: UNC Charlotte

Posted on April 9, 2018 by Lisa Gregory

NCDHC Impact news

Today’s story comes from Dawn Schmitz, Associate Dean for Special Collections & University Archives at UNC Charlotte. We’ve worked with UNC Charlotte to digitize campus publications as well as, most recently, Q-Notes (mentioned and linked below). They have their own robust and growing digital collections site, which includes among other things motorsports photographs, papers documenting key figures in Charlotte history, and oral histories. Dawn’s comments are shared here today with permission.

Article text with rainbow colored picture of Charlotte skyline.

Front page article from the April 26, 2003 issue of Q-Notes.

“For several years, Atkins Library at UNC Charlotte has been working with partners in the Charlotte LGBTQ community to preserve and share their history. In 2015, Jim Yarbrough’s Pride Publishing agreed to donate to the library the entire run of Q-Notes, their high-quality and groundbreaking newspaper. We assured Jim we would do everything possible to have it digitized for the benefit of the Q-Notes staff and the entire community. But in the ensuing years, we found we were not able to raise the funding and did not have the staff to do the project in-house. We worried that we would let down the community that put their trust in us. Then, last year, NCDHC came to the rescue! When their call went out for collections to digitize that document traditionally underrepresented communities in our state, I answered it immediately to nominate Q-Notes. I think the answer “yes” came back within 5 minutes! The digitization started right away, beginning with the first issue in 1986, when Q-Notes began publishing. As of this writing, nearly all issues have been digitized and made available on DigitalNC. Q-Notes frequently blogs to update readers as more issues have been digitized, and NCDHC has also written fabulous blog posts about Q-Notes that really capture its value for LGBTQ history. We are thrilled that this resource is being provided to the community open access, and we are so grateful to both NCDHC and Pride Publishing for making this possible. Too often, valuable resources such as Q-Notes end up behind paywalls and are essentially available only to a limited academic readership. And while Q-Notes is a treasure-trove for scholarly research about Southern queer history, it’s also vital to the broader community’s understanding of its past, including LGBTQ youth. We appreciate NCDHC and congratulate them on a well-deserved nomination for this prestigious award!”

Partners Share Their Stories: Ocracoke Preservation Society’s Past President

Posted on April 5, 2018 by Lisa Gregory

NCDHC Impact news

Today’s story comes from Philip Howard, past president of the Ocracoke Preservation Society. The materials we’ve worked with OPS to digitize have helped the Society’s ongoing efforts at historic preservation.

“As a chronicler of Ocracoke Island history [through his blog and newsletter] and one of the founders and a past president of the Ocracoke Preservation Society, I am acutely aware of the importance of access to historic documents for research. The North Carolina Digital Heritage Center has digitized and placed on their web site numerous letters, brochures, booklets, photographs, and newspaper articles relevant to Ocracoke Island. These important documents are now readily available for anyone interested in Ocracoke’s history. In addition to being used in research for magazine & newspaper articles and books, they have played an important role in providing supporting documentation for the preservation of several homes and other significant structures in Ocracoke’s historic district.“

One specific effort is the Society’s work on behalf of the Island Inn. A local group is hoping to purchase the property to protect it for the future and open it up for community use. Resources digitized and available on DigitalNC.org have helped them document that building’s known and hidden history.

DigitalNC on the web: Black Wide-Awake

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

How DigitalNC materials are being used across the web: Bull City 150

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

DigitalNC on the Web: Genealogy blogs

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

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

Partners Share Their Stories: Watauga County Public Library in Boone

Partners Share Their Stories: UNC Charlotte

Partners Share Their Stories: Ocracoke Preservation Society’s Past President

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