The Gilmer Civil War Maps Collection When the library began considering items to digitize, Laura Clark Brown, head of public services in the Manuscripts Department at UNC's Louis Round Wilson Library, knew right away that the Jeremy Francis Gilmer Collection of Civil War maps and drawings was a prime candidate.

"These items are in incredibly high demand," said Brown. "What's more, they are very difficult to use." Some of the maps are in fragile condition, and many are so large that researchers cannot get close enough to inspect features in the center of the pages.

Digitizing the maps not only brings them to the researcher's computer, but provides new tools for study. The online collection incorporates JPEG2000 technology which allows the reader to zoom in on any portion of the image and magnify it. "The access can actually be better online than with the originals," said Brown.

Jeremy Francis Gilmer was a United States Army engineer and Confederate chief of engineers. The 131 maps and engineer's drawings that make up the online collection are part of the larger Jeremy Gilmer Papers, held in the Manuscripts Department. Items on the site represent the entire southern region, with a particular emphasis on North Carolina and Virginia.

Tobacco Bag Stringing A second online collection explores tobacco bag stringing, a piecework activity that helped sustain families in the tobacco-growing regions of North Carolina and Virginia during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Following imposition of a federal minimum wage in 1938, the Virginia-Carolina Service Corporation, based in Richmond, Va., prepared a report as part of its lobbying campaign to exempt home workers in order to protect their livelihood.

The North Carolina Collection at UNC's Wilson Library holds the only known copy of this report, said Jill Wagy, reference assistant in the collection. The report contains 145 glued-in photographs of bag stringers and their families, along with brief biographical information about the subjects. The online site presents both the text of the report and the annotated photos.

Wagy called the portraits and the stories that accompany them "haunting." "It can be hard to remember that people lived in such extreme conditions so recently," she said.

Wagy said that this project highlights the potential for library resources to be used in new ways. "It's a report about a very specific activity, but it really opens so many windows." Among potential users of the site, she listed those interested in social and economic history, the tobacco industry, women's work, and the often undocumented lives of the rural poor.

The Billy E. Barnes Collection The enduring problem of poverty also forms the basis for the library's third new digital collection. As public relations director for the North Carolina Fund from 1964 through 1969, photographer Billy Ebert Barnes documented poverty in North Carolina and the fund's anti-poverty programs and activities. The Barnes Collection, also part of the North Carolina Collection, holds thousands of negatives, from which the 422 images now online are drawn.

Requests for the Barnes photos have increased in recent years, said Stephen Fletcher, the library's photographic archivist, and that was part of the rationale for making some of the images available digitally.

Fletcher expects scholars, public policy researchers, documentary historians and others to find value in the images which include searing photographs of workers, children, and the elderly, as well as the activities meant to improve lives.