Billy E. Barnes Collection. "Negro boy sitting on steps outside big house" (Durham, N.C., July 1965). Photo by Billy E. Barnes. North Carolina Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Copyright © Billy E. Barnes. Used with permission.

The University Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) is aggressively expanding its digital library program. The library's "Digital Collections" page provides entry to a growing online collection of primary sources drawn from UNC's special and general library collections.

UNC's first and most established digital collection is Documenting the American South (DocSouth), D-Lib's Featured Collection for November 1999. DocSouth has subsequently grown in size and coverage, but remains true to its original mission of providing the highest quality encoded text, supplemented by explanatory materials and scholarly essays.

The newest additions to UNC's digital library went live in July 2006, as pilot projects using the CONTENTdm collection management software. Like DocSouth, the projects focus on collection strengths and rare and unique holdings. However, the emphasis is on presenting primary sources without the extensive contextual and interpretive materials or the deeply encoded text that characterize DocSouth.

In selecting these pilots, the library sought projects with clear intellectual merit that could also provide technical and operational challenges. The lessons learned from working with multiple formats and with collections of varying size, condition, and nature are informing the further development of UNC's digital library. The most recent additions are as follows:

• The Gilmer Civil War Maps Collection presents historic maps that are in high demand, but that are difficult to use because of their fragile condition and large size. The papers of Jeremy Francis Gilmer (1818-1883), a United States Army engineer and Confederate chief of engineers, are a heavily consulted part of UNC's Southern Historical Collection. This project digitized 161 maps representative of the entire southern region, with a particular emphasis on North Carolina and Virginia. The online collection incorporates JPEG2000 technology, allowing the reader to zoom in on any portion of the image and magnify it.

Tobacco Bag Stringing. Leacey Royal and family, Reddies River, N.C. From Report on Tobacco Bag Stringing Operations in North Carolina and Virginia, 1939. North Carolina Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Used with permission.

• Tobacco Bag Stringing facilitates discovery and use of Report on Tobacco Bag Stringing Operations in North Carolina and Virginia, 1939 and the report's 145 striking photographs of rural southern families. UNC's North Carolina Collection holds the only cataloged copy of the publication. Tobacco bag stringing was a piecework activity that sustained many families in the tobacco-growing regions of the American South during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. In digitizing the report, the library experimented with the presentation of a physically complex volume having content in multiple formats. The project also presented the opportunity to make a little-known and seemingly quite specialized work visible for research in new ways and by new users.

• The Billy E. Barnes Collection demonstrates the use of digitization as a tool in the archival processing of photographic negatives. As public relations director for the North Carolina Fund from 1964 through 1969, Billy Ebert Barnes documented poverty in North Carolina and the fund's anti-poverty programs and activities. The Barnes Collection, part of UNC's North Carolina Collection, holds thousands of negatives from which the 422 images now online are drawn. Converting the images and viewing them in positive form allowed archivists to provide more effective descriptive information about them.

Additional projects linked from the digital collections gateway demonstrate the range and variety of the UNC Library's historical collections and the library's commitment to advancing research by bringing the appropriate technologies and expertise to bear. They are as follows:

• The North Carolina Election of 1898
• A Portion of the People: Three Hundred Years of Southern Jewish History
• Paper Currency & Banknotes in the André Savine Collection
• The Photographer Bayard Wootten
• The Thomas Wolfe Collection
• The Rufus Morgan Stereograph Collection
• North Carolina Stereograph Collection (circa 1870 to circa 1904)
• North Carolina County Collection
• North Carolina Civil War Image Portfolio
• A Virtual Museum of University History

Gilmer Civil War Maps Collection. 1864 map of the vicinity of the Grand Rapids Red River, Louisiana, by Jeremy Francis Gilmer. Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Finally, the digital collections page provides access to a range of online exhibits. Slavery and the Making of the University is the digital correlate of a well-received exhibition in the library. Audio exhibits provide samples of Hillbilly Music and clips from the Fiddler's Grove Collection. There is also a permanent record of major exhibitions from the Louis Round Wilson Library for special collections.

Throughout the expansion of its digital collections, the UNC Library remains committed to open access; compliance with standards; implementation of best practices; and the thoughtful selection, curation, and preservation of digital collections. The library announced in February 2006, its membership in the Open Content Alliance. The first person to head the new Carolina Digital Library program will be appointed this fall.

The home page for the Digital Collections at the University Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is at <http://www.lib.unc.edu/digitalprojects.html>.

Copyright^© University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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doi:10.1045/october2006-featured.collection