“Wikipedia Edit-a-thon: African Americans in North Carolina”
Sunday, April 14, 2013
Wilson Special Collections Library
1 – 5 p.m.
Free and open to the public (Registration requested)
Information: Emily Jack, North Carolina Collection Gallery, (919) 962-0104

Academics, history buffs, and Wikipedians are invited to UNC’s first-ever Wikipedia Edit-a-thon on Sunday, April 14, at the Wilson Special Collections Library.

Participants will update, improve, and create new Wikipedia articles about African American history and institutions in North Carolina.

The free public program will take place from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. Refreshments and tours of Wilson Library will be provided.

Participants do not need specialized historical knowledge or experience with Wikipedia. Assistants will help locate book and article source materials and teach Wikipedia syntax and style.

Organizers encourage participants with personal laptops to bring them.

For more details and to register, visit the event page.

The event sponsors are the North Carolina Collection and student groups from the UNC School of Information and Library Science (SILS), including the Student Chapter of the Society of American Archivists (SCOSAA), the Art and Museum Library and Information Student Society (AMLISS), and the Information and Library Science Student Association (ILSSA).

Related Links

• Wikipedia Edit-a-thon registration
• Facebook event page

Every time BioMed Central publishes an article by a UNC affiliate, the article loads automatically to the Library’s Carolina Digital Repository (CDR). The CDR compiles, safeguards, and provides access to the research of UNC faculty and students.

Republishing in the CDR provides an extra layer of security, according to project manager Jill Sexton. It also allows the CDR to capture and share a more extensive picture of research activities at UNC, and to capitalize on the Library’s investments in open access publishing.

In addition to full text of the articles, BioMed Central shares documents related to the articles, such as surveys, pamphlets, and data sets. The CDR preserves these items along with the articles in a growing collection that already contains more than 2,000 items.

The automatic transfer takes place behind the scenes using a technology called Simple Web-Service Offering Repository Deposit (SWORD).

BioMed Central publishes 242 peer-reviewed open access journals, meaning that they are freely available world-wide to researchers and the public. UNC authors enjoy discounted publication fees with BioMed Central, thanks to the Library’s institutional membership in the organization.

The UNC Library is eager to work with additional publishers interested in piloting the SWORD protocol, says Sexton.

To learn more about how the CDR can help manage research outputs or about the transfer of articles from BioMed Central, contact Sexton at jill@email.unc.edu.

Related Links

• BioMed Central collection at UNC
• Carolina Digital Repository
• BioMed Central

The addition is part of a groundbreaking pilot project between OUP and the Triangle Research Libraries Network (TRLN).

The pilot project will bring to UNC:

• 750 new e-books published in 2012-13;
• A print copy of each new e-book, to be shared by TRLN member libraries (UNC, Duke University, North Carolina State University, and North Carolina Central University), along with the option for any of the libraries to acquire additional print copies as needed at a discounted price.

In addition, the UNC Libraries negotiated a related agreement with OUP for a backfile of 7,050 e-books with titles in a wide range of disciplines, including the humanities and social sciences, physical and life sciences, medicine, and law.

Oxford University Press provides e-books for its own publications, as well as nine U.S. and foreign academic publishers, including the University of California Press and the American University in Cairo Press.

The agreement is the first of its kind to bring shared e-book access to a group of cooperating libraries. Because each TRLN member committed to a similar purchase and the single shared print copy, OUP offered deeply reduced prices to the consortium.

“This is a real benefit for researchers at UNC,” said Carol Hunter, associate University librarian for collections and services. “The Library has been able to add thousands of electronic titles plus print access within our existing budget.”

Readers can find titles in the Oxford Scholarship Online collection through a standard catalog search and then read them via most web browsers, as well as on tablet and mobile platforms. There is no limit to the number of simultaneous users that can read the online copy, making the e-books ideal for course reserves or for integration into Sakai course-management software.

“The libraries in the Triangle have a long history of sharing print books and building collections in a cooperative fashion,” said University Librarian Sarah Michalak. “This agreement allows us to build on that history in the electronic realm, which is where researchers increasingly expect to find books.”

The libraries and OUP will evaluate the pilot project at the end of the one-year trial period.

For additional information about the Oxford University Press package and library collections, contact Hunter at (919) 962-1301 or cfhunter@email.unc.edu.

Download exhibit poster (pdf)

An exhibit of Carolina Alumni Review covers and page spreads is now on view in the Wilson Special Collections Library to celebrate the 100^th anniversary of the magazine.

The Alumni Review, a publication of the General Alumni Association (GAA), debuted in October 1912.

To mark the centennial, 35 enlarged covers and five page spreads are on display in the first floor corridor of Wilson Library.

The covers on view include the magazine’s first issue, featuring a drawing of Caldwell Hall, which opened in 1912. Other covers highlight iconic photos of the campus, as well as articles covering key events in University history, such as the admission of UNC’s first African-American undergraduates, the impact of the Civil Rights Movement on Chapel Hill, the 2005 NCAA basketball championship, and the University’s response to the Sept. 11 attacks.

Through an agreement with the Library, the Alumni Review’s complete archive has also been digitized and is available online on the GAA site. Issues from the most recent five years are available to GAA members only, as a benefit of membership; earlier issues are open to anyone.

The exhibit is sponsored by the University Library and the General Alumni Association and will be on view indefinitely.

For exhibit information, contact Wilson Library,  wilsonlibrary@unc.edu or (919) 962-3765.

Related Links

• Digitized issues of the Carolina Alumni Review

A young Jesse Jackson at North Carolina A&T University in 1964.

Yearbooks from 14 of the 17 UNC system institutions – plus 37 other schools – are now archived together online, thanks to a project based at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library.

The North Carolina Digital Heritage Center has scanned and posted the yearbooks as part of the center’s efforts to digitize and preserve college and university yearbooks from across the state.

History buffs and alumni can glimpse these and other famous grads as young adults:

• Andy Griffith as president of the glee club at Chapel Hill in 1947;
• Jesse Jackson as president of the student government at North Carolina A&T University in 1964;
• ESPN reporter Stephen A. Smith at Winston-Salem State University in 1991;
• Singer Emmylou Harris at UNC Greensboro in 1966; and
• A bearded David Sedaris of later literary fame at Western Carolina University in 1976.

So far, the project has scanned more than 800,000 pages from 51 schools, including 14 of the 15 university-level institutions in the UNC system. The earliest is the 1890 “Hellenian” from Chapel Hill. North Carolina State University previously digitized its yearbooks independently.

Author David Sedaris at Western Carolina University in 1976.

In addition to celebrity-spotting, the yearbooks highlight changes in student culture and life, said Nick Graham, program coordinator for the center.

“The one constant across the years has been sports,” said Graham.

The North Carolina Collection at UNC’s Wilson Special Collections Library manages the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center. The center works with libraries, museums, historical societies, and cultural institutions across the state to publish historical materials online.

The center is currently expanding the North Carolina Yearbooks collection by reaching out to community colleges, said Graham.

Another major program is the effort to digitize old runs of campus and community newspapers from across the state.

The State Library of North Carolina supports the center with funds from the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library and Services and Technology Act. UNC contributes the technical and administrative infrastructure and the expertise of staff consultants.

Related Links

• Yearbooks from 51 N.C. colleges, universities archived together online (UNC news release)
• North Carolina Colleges and University Yearbooks
• North Carolina Digital Heritage Center

Explore "Driving Through Time"

The history of the Blue Ridge Parkway, America’s most visited National Park System site, is now online.

The new collection, Driving Through Time: The Digital Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina, was created through a collaborative project based at the Library of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Driving Through Time presents photographs, maps, news articles, oral histories, and essays documenting development and construction of the parkway’s North Carolina segment.

The site invites users to explore parkway history chronologically, geographically, or by dozens of topics from access roads and automobiles to wildlife and workmen. An interactive maps feature layers historical maps atop current road maps and satellite images. The comparisons provide insight into the parkway’s development and its impact on pre-parkway towns, farms, roads, and topography.

The 469-mile parkway radically altered the landscape of 29 Virginia and North Carolina counties when it was built between 1934 and 1987, and its construction sparked intense controversy, said Anne Mitchell Whisnant, adjunct associate professor of history at UNC and the project’s scholarly adviser.

Whisnant, author of the parkway history Super-Scenic Motorway (UNC Press, 2006) and the children’s book When the Parkway Came (Primary Source Publishers, 2010), was often frustrated as she combed archives and historic documents and tried to translate conflicts about routing and land rights into words.

“I found myself thinking, ‘If only I could see and show what and where they’re talking about, it would be so much easier to explain the arguments,’” she said. “Driving Through Time makes the park’s history visible and accessible to historians, planners, local communities, landowners, and anyone who wants to know more about this American landmark.”

At the heart of the project are thousands of items from three institutions that collaborated to create the site: The Wilson Special Collections Library at UNC; the Blue Ridge Parkway headquarters (a division of the National Park Service, located in Asheville); and the North Carolina State Archives.

Materials in the online collection include:

• Historic photographs showing construction of the parkway and images of communities it passed through;
• Maps depicting private land parcels purchased for the parkway, proposed alternate routes, landscape planning, and the completed parkway;
• Letters and documents pertaining to the community of Little Switzerland in McDowell and Mitchell counties, which sued the parkway;
• Oral histories from parkway designers and laborers;
• Images by the late N.C. photographer Hugh Morton, depicting the parkway as it passed Grandfather Mountain, which he owned.

Eleven essays share more insight into the building of the parkway and its impact. Whisnant and her students wrote about issues including competition between the tourism and logging industries, the parkway’s impact on the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, and selection of the parkway route.

Also included are K-12 lesson plans that faculty from the School of Education developed to help students use the site’s extensive primary source materials and interpretive essays.

Driving Through Time was made possible by a $150,000 grant from the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services under provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act, as administered by the State Library of North Carolina.

Related Links

• Driving Through Time: The Digital Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina
• Super-Scenic Motorway: A Blue Ridge Parkway History, by Anne Mitchell Whisnant (UNC Press)

Watch a video about Articles+

Searching for journal articles, news stories, and e-book content has just become easier at UNC.

The new Articles+ search enables discovery of library resources using a single search box.  A simple query will return results from scholarly journal articles, newspapers, magazines, e-book chapters, dissertations, and more.

Researchers can revise results by limiting to peer-reviewed items, date of publication, language, and other criteria.

Articles+ is powered by Summon, a discovery tool developed by the Serials Solutions division of ProQuest.

Students and researchers have requested this sort of simple search across online content for years, said University Librarian Sarah Michalak, but the technology simply hasn’t been up to the task.

“Summon makes the Library’s investment in electronic journals truly pay off for the people who need to find and access articles,” she said. “We know this will improve research for nearly everyone.”

Kim Vassiliadis, Instructional Design and Technology Librarian, said the new discovery tool is an excellent resource not only for students who need a quick way to search, but also for scholars with complex multidisciplinary topics.

“Summon is terrific at finding articles across seemingly unrelated disciplines,” said Vassiliadis. “Since introducing it in December, we’ve received a lot of positive feedback from faculty and students alike.”

Librarians are eager to hear from students and staff. Try an Articles+ search and then share your comments and suggestions.

Related Links

• Search Smarter video demonstration

Read the 1812 Henderson's North Carolina Almanack

North Carolinians rang in the year 1812 with predictions of a hard frost on February 22 and thunder on July 23. They could learn when eclipses would take place; when the state’s federal, district, and county courts would convene; and how to revive a dead drowning victim.

Two hundred years after its publication, Thomas Henderson’s 1812 North Carolina Almanack has a new digital life.

It is the 10,000^th book that the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library has digitized from its collections using a high-speed scanner and software application known as the “Scribe.”

The selection of the almanac is especially meaningful for this milestone, said Robert Anthony, curator of the North Carolina Collection in UNC’s Wilson Special Collections Library.

“Two centuries ago, an almanac was often the only book in many North Carolina homes, along with a Bible,” said Anthony. “Selecting this work for digitization gives a very direct glimpse into daily life in the Tar Heel State.”

The Scribe scanner at the Carolina Digital Library and Archives

Developed for libraries by the San Francisco-based Internet Archive, UNC’s Scribe scanner arrived in 2007 as part of the Carolina Digital Library and Archives (CDLA) in Wilson Library. The CDLA has used the Scribe to scan and publish digital versions of rare and unique books that could otherwise only be consulted in Chapel Hill.

UNC’s “scribed” books are freely available through the Library’s catalog and the Internet Archive website. The volumes include early Spanish dramas, historic North Carolina business and legislative materials, and back issues of the UNC student yearbook Yackety Yack.

According to Jenn Riley, head of the CDLA, the Scribe program has significantly expanded digital library operations at UNC. “Now the Library can put content from our collections online on a scale that far exceeds what we could do in the past,” she said.

The Library operates an additional Scribe machine as part of the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center, housed in the North Carolina Collection. The Center offers free or low-cost digitization and online hosting services to cultural heritage institutions across the state.

Related Links

• Thomas Henderson’s 1812 North Carolina Almanack
• UNC Library materials on the Internet Archive
• Carolina Digital Library and Archives
• North Carolina Collection
• North Carolina Digital Heritage Center

Page 90 of the James L. Dusenbery diary.

A ‘possum hunt, a thwarted visit to a “harlot,” and a fight between students armed with sticks and pistols may not mark the typical senior year of a Carolina undergraduate. All were episodes, however, in the student life of James L. Dusenbery, who graduated from UNC in 1842.

Now a digital edition of the diary Dusenbery kept during his senior year gives researchers and the general public an intimate glimpse into the life of the young scholar and his times.

“Verses and Fragments: The James L. Dusenbery Journal (1841-1842)” is the latest addition to the UNC Library’s Documenting the American South (DocSouth) digital publishing program. It is the result of a collaboration between the Library and scholar Erika Lindemann, associate dean for undergraduate curricula at UNC.

Lindemann, who retired in 2009 as a professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature, came across the diary in the Southern Historical Collection at UNC’s Wilson Special Collections Library.

“We know very little about the daily lives of 19^th-century students, especially those attending Southern universities,” said Lindemann, who also helped to develop the DocSouth collection “True and Candid Compositions: The Lives and Writings of Antebellum Students at the University of North Carolina.”

The diary, she said, is an important primary source for learning about the antebellum South and the history of education.

Plus, she asks, “Who could resist an opportunity to snoop through someone’s journal?”

The first part of the diary contains 27 poems copied from other sources and six excerpts from Sir Walter Scott’s Lady of the Lake. Forty-four entries follow, providing, in Dusenbery’s words, “a weekly record of all the leading events of my life during our Senior year in College, together with our thoughts & reflections at the time.”

Dusenbery (1821-1886) came to UNC from Lexington, N.C. Like today’s students, said Lindemann, “he thoroughly enjoyed his senior year.”

In addition to presenting the diary as images of the manuscript pages paired with transcriptions, the site offers modules of related materials in the form of essays by Lindemann and several graduate students, and scanned items from Wilson Library and the Health Sciences Library. The modules explore Dusenbery’s immediate family; student life at UNC and the college’s debating societies; student taste in literature and music; and the study of medicine, which both Dusenbery and his brother Edwin pursued upon graduation.

The project was made possible by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities Office of Digital Humanities; the UNC Center for the Study of the American South; the College of Arts and Sciences; the Department of English and Comparative Literature; UNC’s University Research Council; and an anonymous Library donor.

Related Links

• Verses and Fragments: The James L. Dusenbery Journal (1841-1842)
• Documenting the American South

The venture, DocSouth Books, allows readers to purchase reprinted classic editions from the collections of the UNC Library. The books were originally scanned as part of the Library’s Documenting the American South (DocSouth) digital publishing program.

Beginning this month, UNC Press will offer bound print-on-demand copies of the books at prices ranging from $15 to $40. The Press will soon also make the books available as downloadable e-books.

The titles are slave narratives, or biographies and autobiographies of fugitive and former slaves. Included is Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave, recently slated for Hollywood adaptation by Brad Pitt.

The Library launched DocSouth in 1996 as a pilot to bring a small number of highlights from the stacks to a broader audience online. Today, DocSouth comprises fifteen collections of 1,454 digitized books, along with maps, images, oral histories, manuscripts, and primary source materials.

By converting some of those digital files to new print editions and even to e-books, access to rare materials has expanded greatly, said Jenn Riley, head of the Carolina Digital Library and Archives, which includes DocSouth.

“Users now have two new ways to engage with these books,” she said. “This collaboration with the UNC Press makes perfect sense as a way to expand the scope of DocSouth.”

Related Links

• DocSouth Books information and order page (UNC Press)
• Documenting the American South
• Carolina Digital Library and Archives