The Carolina Bands Collection is comprised of hundreds of letters, pages of drill, photographs, football programs, and newspaper clippings. In total, the collection presents a unique view of the history of bands at the University of South Carolina from 1914 until the present.

The collection was given to the University of South Carolina in part by the late James Pritchard Sr. Pritchard's portion of the collection contained numerous photographs and correspondence, along with many items pre-dating his appointment with the University. His career included the U.S. Army Air Force Band (1942-1946), the Juilliard School of Music, (BS & MS degrees, 1946-1949), and Director of Music for the Sumter (SC) City Schools (1949-1959). Pritchard was the Director of Bands for the University of South Carolina from July 1959 until his resignation in May 1969, at which time he focused on teaching music education classes as Associate Professor for the Department of Music within the University.

This collection was also given in part by James K. Copenhaver. Copenhaver's portion of the collection contains hundreds of football programs, correspondence, recordings (in several multimedia formats), and pages of drill instructions. Copenhaver was appointed Director of Bands in 1976, but before coming to the University, he taught at Holmes High School in Covington (KY), Morehead State University, Clemson University, and Florida State University. Under his direction, the Carolina Band grew to its largest membership, gained national attention, and moved back under the direction of the newly named School of Music.

James D. Pritchard, Sr.

James K. Copenhaver

The materials in the Carolina Bands Collection have been archivally boxed. They are housed in the Music Library special collections area. By digitizing these pictures, drill charts, and other documents, students, staff, and alumni can gain a better appreciation and perspective on the Carolina Bands. For more on the history of the School of Music at the University of South Carolina, please consult:

-Ashlie Keylon Conway Music Librarian for Audio and Digital Services Music Library

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the Head of the Music Library, Jennifer Ottervik, for suggesting this as a possible digital collection. Also, thanks to the Pritchard Family and James K. Copenhaver for their assistance. Thanks to Ashlie Keylon Conway for processing and combining the collections. The project could also not have been completed without the work of Thomas Hammond, Luis Mercado, Jeanette Fontaine (student employees of the Music Library), and Kate Boyd, (of the Digital Activities Department). Special thanks go to Scott Phinney and Douglas King, both of cataloging.

Creating the Digital Collection

This collection was scanned on a flatbed EPSON GT-15000 scanner, using EPSONscan 2.94E software. Ashlie scanned the images as color TIFFs at 300 ppi for Series I (Sheet Music). For the rest of the Series, Luis and Thomas scanned the images as color TIFFS at 600 ppi. From the TIFFs they each created high quality JPEGs and added the preservation metadata to the TIFF and JPEG images. The JPEGs were then uploaded to CONTENTdm. The TIFFs will be maintained as the archival masters on a SAN server, backed-up to DVD and tape.

Ian Conway created a home page for the collection, and Ashlie created the metadata in an Excel spread sheet and wrote an introduction. The metadata records follow the Western States Best Practices Dublin Core format and were uploaded as a tab delimited file at the same time as the images. Kate reviewed the collection and uploaded the images to the CONTENTdm database. Tony Branch is the systems administrator for the CONTENTdm database and helps to manage the computers and scanners in the Digital Activities Department.