Executive Summary
"Extending the Reach of Southern Sources: Proceeding to Large-Scale Digitization of Manuscript Collections" is a project undertaken by the Southern Historical Collection (SHC), funded through a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The grant enabled the SHC staff to study the feasibility of digitizing the SHC's collections and to plan a long-term digitization program.
Housed at the Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, the SHC encompasses more than 4,600 individual collections comprised of millions of individual documents. Through this project a "decision matrix" was developed for selecting and prioritizing the massive holdings of the SHC for digitization, and the Digital Southern Historical Collection was planned.
The SHC staff investigated the digitization experiences of staff at other archival collections; carefully considered the SHC's archival mission; and, most critically, conducted extensive conversations with the primary audience for the SHC: the scholars of the history of the American South. Feedback and input were sought through focus groups with graduate students, interviews with individual scholars, attendance at professional conferences, site visits, a scholars' workshop, and two symposia with archivists and librarians.
The SHC will digitize many of its 4,600+ collections in their entirety. The detailed decision matrix will serve as a guide for the staff as it makes decisions about which collections to digitize and about the priorities for digitization. This matrix has already been used to prioritize 1,030 collections for digitization. Through a digitization-on-demand program, users and collection donors who desire a digital version of a collection that is not slated for digitization, or that was not going to be digitized soon enough to suit their needs, will be able to request that a collection be digitized and will pay a modest fee to help offset the cost of the service.
The SHC and the University Library are committed to developing and sustaining the Digital Southern Historical Collection. This commitment will require the consistent allocation of current staff time and resources as well as the continual expansion of technological capacity and periodic hiring of additional staff to accommodate an ever-growing Digital SHC. Digitization will continue throughout each year, although the pace will be partially determined by the resources allotted through the annual budget and by the availability of external funding.
The digital search room experience will mirror the physical search room experience in which scholars interact with primary sources directly. There are no current plans to frame the digitized manuscripts with contextualizing or interpretive information or to supplement the documents with resources such as scholarly essays, lesson plans, interactive features, or social networking communities. The organization of the digital version of each collection will mirror the organization of its physical counterpart in the SHC.
The digital version of each individual document will be a high-resolution image file. Digitized material will be made available over the Internet free of charge, and users will not be required to enroll in a subscription service, or to be affiliated with a university or other institution.
Although it is difficult to predict the directions in which innovations in technology and historical scholarship will lead, the decisions made at this early stage of the digitization process have left room for the possibility of different choices being made in the future, thus allowing the digital version of the SHC to continually remain flexible and responsive to the needs of its users.