UNC–Chapel Hill University Library
The University Library is part of a library system at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with holdings that include approximately six million volumes; four million microforms; two million government publications; twenty million manuscripts; hundreds of thousands of audiovisuals, maps, and photographs; and thousands of electronic titles accessed in more than a dozen libraries on the UNC-Chapel Hill campus. The Library serves as a leader in the development of scholarly communication systems and the application of information technology to teaching, research and learning. The Library is a member of the Association of Research Libraries, the Center for Research Libraries, the Triangle Research Libraries Network (TRLN), and SOLINET.
The University Library has made a strong beginning and is steadily gaining experience in digitizing the full range of manuscript materials, including documents, maps, images, fragile letters and diaries, sound recordings, and moving images. A grant from the Mellon Foundation is helping to fund digitization of the bibliographic record of the André Savine Collection of 20th century Russian Diaspora Materials. The Library’s Documenting the American South project (DocSouth) is a sustained electronic publishing initiative comprising an online digitized collection of more than 1,250 full-text books, manuscripts, images, artifacts, and audio files. A recipient of prestigious awards and funding from numerous sources, DocSouth is enormously popular with users throughout the world, generating more than fifty million unique visits each year.
The Library recently created the Carolina Digital Library (CDL). It is composed of three units: Digital Publishing and Projects Management Office, which includes the DocSouth; Technology Research & Development Group; and Digital Production Center. This strategic digital library program will coordinate the University’s institutional repository, using technology to advance and strengthen the Library’s collections and services to its campus community and the world. Plans include creation of transparent interfaces between digital library holdings and other information access tools, and development of collaborative partnerships with other University departments and local, national, and international organizations.
The "Extending the Reach" project will be guided by the opinions of leading scholars in southern history and related fields and informed by the expertise of specialists in information sciences, intellectual property, librarianship, digital publishing and archival management. The University Library will draw on its own expertise as well as that of other campus resources to achieve project goals. The Library’s SHC is allied with the University’s collaborative Center for the Study of the American South (CSAS), created to further research, teaching, and public dialogue about the history, culture, and contemporary experience of the American South.
Other campus partners include the School of Law, the School of Information and Library Science (SILS), and the Renaissance Computing Institute. SILS houses ibiblio.org, "the Public’s Library"—a Web-based conservancy of freely available software, music, literature, art, history, science, politics and cultural studies. The Open Video Project, funded by the National Science Foundation, is a shared digital video repository and test collection that contains video or metadata for two thousand digitized video segments. The University’s Renaissance Computing Institute is developing technologies that enable institutional repositories to manage and store massive amounts of digitized content and make them easily accessible to users.
This project’s outcome will be a decision matrix and model for developing, funding, and sustaining large-scale digital manuscript collections that meet the needs and priorities of scholars, researchers, and archivists in a wide range of fields and institutions. The University Library is prepared to build on its expertise and provide leadership in developing thoughtful, scholar-driven strategies for planning, creating, and sustaining digitization of major documentary collections.