American South Collections

Overview of Campus Library Collections

Humanities	Folklore	History
Journalism	Linguistics	Literature
Media	Newspapers	Radio, Television, Motion Pictures
Religion	African-American Studies	Anthropology and Archaeology
Business and Economics	Education	Geography
Political Science and Law	Sociology and Social Work

The libraries of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have been documenting the American South at the research level for most of this century. The scope of coverage in Davis (the main)and the Undergraduate libraries includes all subject areas except fine arts, some materials on city and regional planning (which are in the City and Regional Planning and School of Government libraries), law, and those sciences collected by a branch library.

Materials in Davis and the Undergraduate libraries include books, serials, government publications, microforms, and computer files on disk. The Media Rsources Center in the Undergraduate Library, however, houses all the audio-visual titles, while the Maps Collection in Wilson Library is responsible for maps.

Although Davis Library acquires materials related to the South on a broad scale, its collections are particularly strong where they support major teaching and research programs on campus. For specialized or expensive research materials , such as large microform sets or extensive newspaper backfires, Davis Library cooperates with the libraries at Duke University and North Carolina State University. These libraries, by cooperatively documenting the South, minimize the number of duplicate holdings of highly specialized titles and maximize the number of unique holdings in the Research Triangle libraries.

The following subject collections offer significant strengths for research on the American South in UNC-Chapel Hill’s main library:

HUMANITIES:

Library collections in the humanities are strong, at least in part because they have been tended carefully for years. UNC-Chapel Hill is the oldest university in the state, and at least some of its library collections have been nurtured since the eigh teenth century.

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FOLKLORE:

UNC-Chapel Hill has one of the few M.A. level folklore programs in the country and has primary responsibility for folklore for the Triangle (Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill) area. The library collections include most folklore titles on the Southeast publish ed by major and minor presses, especially materials on folktales, folksongs, and folk artifacts, such as duck decoys, gravestones and quilts.

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HISTORY:

The History Department at UNC-Chapel Hill offers the Ph.D. degree with a specialization in Southern History, which the Library supports at a high level. The collections of materials on all peri ods of Southern history are deep and broad. They are particularly strong for slavery, the Civil War, the New South, civil rights, African-Americans, and American Indians. (Other ethnic groups in the region are less well represented.) The Library also has many biographies and autobiographies of Southerners. It is rich in county histories of the region as well. Indeed; taken together with Duke University’s Southern local histories, the richest collection of such titles in the nation is in the Triangle. The Library does not collect family histories, however, and there are few titles on numismatics.

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JOURNALISM:

UNC-Chapel Hill has doctoral level programs in this field and the Library has primary responsibility in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill (Research Triangle) area for collecting titles in it. There is an extensive collection of newspapers on microfilm for the South. (See "Newspapers," below.) The collections also house compilations of material reprinted from small Southern newspapers and biographies of journalists.

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LlNGUISTICS:

UNC-Chapel Hill offers the Ph.D. degree in linguistics. Because the university gives the only advanced degree in the Triangle in this area, the Library has primary responsibility for acquiring titles in it. The collections include scholarly books on l inguistics; dictionaries, grammars and other primary source materials for American Indian languages; and studies of Southern dialects.

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LITERATURE:

UNC-Chapel Hill offers the Ph.D. in English and American literature and emphasizes Southern and African-American literature in particular. The Library houses the works of over 1,000 contemporary American authors, many of whom are from the South or are African-American authors. Unfortunately, the retrospective collections of Southern literature are not as strong as they deserve to be, although the Library had 96% of the Southern titles listed in Spiller's Literary History of the United States: Bibliography (1974). The Rare Book Collection houses some 2,000 novels about the Civil War.

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MEDIA:

The Non-print Section of the Undergraduate Library includes materials on the South. Indeed, holdings of titles on the civil rights movement and protest songs are quite extensive. Librarians plan to expand their collection of African-American films and folklore documentaries.

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NEWSPAPERS:

Over the years, UNC-Chapel Hill has developed cooperative programs for Southern newspaper backfires on microfilm with Duke University. Together the two institutions house at least one major newspaper from the capital or most important city (demographic ally, economically or culturally) in fourteen of the seventeen states that make up the Federal Census Southern Region. As for special newspapers, Duke and UNC-Chapel Hill cooperatively acquire African-American newspapers on microform. They are cataloged and appear on the serials’ fiches of the two libraries. In add ition, the North Carolina Collection at UNC-Chapel Hill collects North Carolina newspapers on film.

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RADIO, TELEVISION, MOTION PICTURES:

UNC-Chapel Hill offers the only M. A. degree in this field in the Triangle, so the Library has made the primary commitment to collect material in this area. Although there is not much of a Southern component to this field, the Library houses some film, radio and television scripts that relate to the South.

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RELIGION:

UNC-Chapel Hill offers the Ph.D. in religion, but the Duke Divinity School library is responsible for building the major collection on religion in the Triangle. While not as rich as Duke’s, the UNC-Chapel Hill collections do include histories of religion i n the South and major histories, doctrinal and liturgical studies of religious,groups based in the South. The Library gets biographies of religious figures only if they have regional or national stature. It does not collect biographies of local religious figures, sermons, devotional materials, or histories of specific churches, even when they are Southern.

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SOCIAL SCIENCES:

Davis Library attempts to support all the social science disciplines with research collections at the doctoral level. In addition to the special collections in Wilson Library that have a specific focus on North Carolina or the region, Davi s collections also include extensive holdings of specialized materials on many aspects of the South. In particular Davis is more likely to hold older titles, books under 50 pages, ephemeral periodicals, microform sets, state government documents, and microcomputer databases in the social sciences when they deal with the South.

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AFRICAN-AMERICAN STUDIES:

Davis Library has comprehensive collections in all areas of African-American Studies except the fine arts (which are the responsibility of the art and music departmental libraries), particularly when these materials focus on the South. In addi tion to strong monographic and serial publications, including good retrospective holdings, Davis has many major archival and manuscript collections in microform, especially in the area of civil rights.

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ANTHROPOLOGY AND ARCHAEOLOGY:

Davis Library collects in depth anthropological and archaeological titles (including prehistoric and traditional arts and crafts) on all parts of the eastern U.S. falling below an imaginary line intersecting New York City and San Antonio. It also has good holdings of archaeological site reports for the region' Davis selects only basic works in anthropology dealing specifically with North Carolina, however, and does not collect any archaeological site reports from the state. The North Carolina Collection in Wilson Library collects these materials for the state, while relying on the State Archaeological Office in Raleigh to get any contract reports.

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BUSINESS AND ECONOMICS:

Davis Library has comprehensive collections on business and economic conditions in the South, including nearly all significant statistical compilations. Within this context, the Business Administration/Social Sciences (BA/SS) machine-readable data center has important holdings of economic and social data on microcomputer disk for states in the region, going down in a few cases to a county level. Davis also has the census returns in microform for the seventeen states in the federal census South through 1900. In addition, its holdings include most significant historical studies, especially for those industries, companies, or entrepreneurs that have figured prominently in the region.

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EDUCATION:

Davis Library maintains comprehensive collections of major studies dealing with educational policy and trends for the South. it also has good holdings on the history and current status of public education at the state level and biographies of leading Southern educators. In addition, Davis collections contain the most significant titles on important universities and colleges in the South, including both public and private, together with most book length histories of black and Women’s educational institutions in the region with the exception of North Carolina. In this last case, the North Carolina Collection has these materials.

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GEOGRAPHY:

Davis Library has strong collections on the regions cultural, economic, physical, and social geography, ranging from accounts of early European exploration to the latest reports on the spatial dynamics of the region's urban sprawl. Its holdings consist of books (including atlases), serials, and microcomputer cartographic data sets. Davis also has works on the South's ecology and environment that fall outside the scope of the science libraries. (The Map Collection in Wilson Library collects maps.)

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POLITICAL SCIENCE AND LAW:

Davis Library has comprehensive collections on politics and government in the South and the states in the region. It also has strong holdings of specialized titles, including studies of county and local government and published data, such as election statistics. The Business Administration and Social Sciences (BA/SS) unit has good holdings of state documents for the region, particularly legislative journals, blue books, and data compendia of all sorts. In addition, Davis collections also contain many serials and non-pamphlet books by and about extremist groups, ranging from the Klan to the New Right, with a significant regional presence. (In actuality, many of the most incendiary of these extremist publications are now in the Wilson Library storage area, so as to minimize the chances of theft or mutilation.)

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SOCIOLOGY AND SOCIAL WORK:

Davis Library has very comprehensive collections on the social life of the region. It has particularly strong holdings related to women and gender; blacks; race, racism, and discrimination; class; poverty; demography; and social conditions, conflicts, and problems. Davis' extensive documentation on the South also includes major microcomputer computer files of social data, many manuscript/archival sources and pamphlet collections in microform.

by Patricia Buck Dominguez, Humanities Bibliographer, Luke Swindler, Social Science Bibliographer

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