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In the not too distant past, using any of the special collections in USC's libraries meant having to access them in person.
Now, thanks to the work of 15 librarians and students from the School of Library and Information Science, a growing number of the collections are available online through Thomas Cooper Library's Digital Activities Center.
"This has been a lot of fun," said Kate Boyd, the library's digital collections librarian who, over the past two years, has spearheaded the team's efforts resulting in the digitization of 16 collections, including some 6,000 images.
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| Kate Boyd |
The online collections represent a broad smorgasbord of the library's holdings, from historical soil survey maps of the state to The Papers of Paul Hamilton (1762 to 1816), the U.S. Secretary of the Navy whose letters described developments leading up to the War of 1812.
Also included are collections from the University's Map and Newsfilm libraries, Rare Books and Special Collections, University Archives, and the USC Beaufort Library, including its Bonneville Collection consisting of late 19th century photographs, postcards, and artifacts pertaining to the American Plains Indians.
So far, less than 1 percent of the libraries' total collections have been put online, and Boyd cheerfully acknowledges, "There's no end in sight."
Of the collections that will be digitized in the future, she is interested in hearing from faculty on what collections they would like to see processed.
"We're trying to take our cue from the faculty," said Boyd, "especially faculty who would like to incorporate use of the materials into their course work."
She is aware that faculty and students from more than one department will sometimes use the same collections, like the I. DeQuincy Newman Papers documenting the life of the South Carolina civil rights leader. The papers are being processed for the Web now and will be available next year.
And she also knows there are some collections that faculty members want students to see in person in the library. "But having them online might also serve as an added attraction that would enable students to go home at night and then look at an image again while they're working on an assignment."
Computerization of the materials also means that faculty can import images from the collections to their Power Point programs for use in classrooms or elsewhere.
Boyd was tapped for the project based on her experience working on the American Memory Web site, the digital collection of the Library of Congress.
Much of the early digitization work has been of the South Caroliniana Library's collection and that of Rare Books and Special Collections.
The first to be scanned was the Otto F. Ege Collection, original leaves from Medieval manuscripts. Scott Gwara, a professor of English, was interested in the collection for use as a teaching tool. There also is a movement to virtually reassemble books from the time between 1923 and the 1950s when Ege tore pages out of them to resell as sets.
The second collection to be digitized was the famed 19th- to early 20th-century Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps showing information necessary for insurance underwriters working in South Carolina. The maps were scanned, in part, because history professor Robert Weyeneth was interested in them being on the Web and "we want to make South Carolina history available to citizens," Boyd said.
Other collections being processed include the University's archive of yearbooks; a collection of 1,500 photographs from throughout the state by Carl Julien; and a collection of the state's old broadsides or posters dating from 1744.
The most recent material to be processed is a small Civil War-era newspaper, The New South, published in Port Royal and Beaufort from 1862 to 1866. That work, which will be available online around Christmas, is part of the library's effort to join the National Endowment for the Humanities National Digital Newspaper Project that will combine papers from different states on one Web site at the Library of Congress.
Another project involves finding outside funding to scan all 130,000 of the library's aerial photos of the state and referencing them with the Geographic Information System to expand their use in a variety of applications.
USC is the only academic institution in South Carolina with a full-blown digital program, said Boyd. But a consortium known as PASCAL (the Partnership Among South Carolina Academic Libraries) hopes to eventually have a central South Carolina digital library with a single database that would link every library's holdings within the state.
"That would be ideal, not only in posting our own materials but also in working with other institutions," said Boyd, who can be reached at boydkf@gwm.sc.edu.
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Kate Boyd has spearheaded the work of Cooper Library's Digital Activities Center, which has prepared 16 collections for the Web, including the Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps of South Carolina (an example is shown far below); the Otto F. Ege Manuscripts Collection, below; and the Pope Brown Collection of South Carolina Natural History, above.
