Southern Historical Collection
The Southern Historical Collection (SHC) in the Louis Round Wilson Library at UNC-Chapel Hill has long been at the center of inquiry into the history and culture of the American South. Since 1930 its resources have served the research needs of eminent historians—John Hope Franklin, Eugene Genovese, Anne Firor Scott, and Drew Gilpin Faust are examples—as well as thousands of other academics and individuals with curiosity and research projects concerning the past of the southern region and the nation.
The SHC holds more than sixteen million items and includes letters, diaries, oral histories, photographs, film and sound recordings, financial records and literary manuscripts. These documents reflect the lives of leaders, workers, plantation owners, slaves, educators, activists, lawyers, writers and musicians and others from all walks of life. They document life from the late eighteenth century through the last decade, chronicling plantation culture, the Civil War, politics, African-American life and race relations, business and labor, rural life, and family relations. Materials range from some of the largest and richest collections of antebellum plantations anywhere, representing all southern states (the Cameron Family Papers run to over fifty thousand items, for instance), to nationally prominent politicians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (including U.S. senators Tom Watson of Georgia and Sam Ervin of North Carolina) to records of social change organizations like the Southern Tenant Farmers Union and the Penn Center, Inc., to civil rights leaders such as Floyd McKissick and Allard Lowenstein. Among the most heavily used materials are thousands of interviews with individuals ranging from politicians to textile workers conducted by the university’s Southern Oral History Program.
The Library constantly extends its holdings in the SHC and expands access to them. Materials from the collections were microfilmed beginning in the 1930s, and hundreds of collections have been filmed with grant funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, and the Rockefeller Foundation. Other collections have been filmed commercially. One project, for example, University Publications of America’s "Records of Antebellum Southern Plantations," included the pre-Civil War portions of 255 SHC collections, far more than were included from any other repository. It is no surprise that the bibliography of any published work of southern history almost invariably includes a long list of SHC collections. These collections include every significant documentary format, and therefore provide an ideal test bed for investigating the technical and research challenges and decisions related to digital access.
A small selection of the SHC’s print and manuscript materials have been digitized as part of the Library’s Documenting the American South (DocSouth) initiative and other web publications. It is a high priority of the University Library to make the SHC and similar manuscript collections more accessible to scholars, educators, and students. It has been pursuing this goal in the first instance by ensuring that all of its holdings are represented by summary records in the Library’s online catalog and by working to make legacy and new finding aids available on the web in Encoded Archival Description (EAD) format. Large-scale digitization is the next step in enhancing this access.