Since 2010, the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center has scanned 615,391 newspaper issues, 16,451 yearbooks and thousands of books, documents and photographs, with more being added every day from across the Tar Heel State. And if you have access to the internet, you can easily find every one of them.The expansive reach of DigitalNC, the online home for all of these items, has spread to every corner of the state since it was established 15 years ago. A partnersh...
Since 2010, the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center has scanned 615,391 newspaper issues, 16,451 yearbooks and thousands of books, documents and photographs, with more being added every day from across the Tar Heel State. And if you have access to the internet, you can easily find every one of them.
The expansive reach of DigitalNC, the online home for all of these items, has spread to every corner of the state since it was established 15 years ago. A partnership between UNC-Chapel Hill University Libraries and the State Library of North Carolina, the center supports libraries, historic sites, community groups, alumni associations, museums, colleges and universities across all 100 counties by digitizing materials for them and opening the door to researching the state’s unique history and culture.
“This is local history,” said Lisa Gregory, director of the center, which is housed in Wilson Library. “It’s everyone’s history. About 75% of the content available on DigitalNC isn’t available anywhere else on the internet, so this is a valuable tool for people to learn about their communities. I think this is especially important for kids who are learning about where they live and about our past. I love that we’re supporting students here in North Carolina and across the country.”
The center’s staff works with 356 partners in 181 towns and communities statewide, and those numbers continue to grow each year. Its ability to reach the more than 5 million visitors to DigitalNC since 2010 has been powered by funds from the Institute of Museum and Library Services through the Library Services and Technology Act, a federal program created to support libraries and the services they offer. Gregory estimates that the efforts of the librarians, digital archives specialists and graduate students on her team help save smaller libraries, museums and other community groups more than $2 million per year in costs that they otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford.
“Many of these small organizations don’t have the funds to purchase scanners. More importantly, they don’t have the funds to hire people,” Gregory said. “DigitalNC allows them to have a broader footprint and impact beyond their brick-and-mortar walls and reach people that aren’t local but still have ties to that area or want to learn more.”
The center’s latest efforts focus on the western part of the state. After Hurricane Helene devastated the area, Gregory and her team wanted to offer their services to help in any way they could.
“We reached out to our partners there, many of which have little funding and are located in old buildings susceptible to damage, to find out which materials were most at risk that we needed to prioritize,” Gregory said. “Newspapers are super fragile, ephemeral — there are so many of them, often stored in basements and not in the best conditions. We started to hear from people, both partners and website users, that digitizing these items was the greatest need.”
The North Carolina Digital Heritage Center team is currently working to digitize multiple newspaper titles from the mountain region, including five volumes of the Avery Herald, in Avery County, that are held nowhere else.
While other states have similar programs, DigitalNC is unique in that the center does not impose requirements for what it will digitize, allowing partners to prioritize the materials that are most relevant for their communities. The State Library of North Carolina’s distribution of funds is one of the most expansive in the country and allows more organizations with limited resources to make their archives available to the public.
Categories Local & State, Research, University Libraries