From 1880-1945, three distinct forces helped transform the city: textiles, teachers and troops. Now, six important area institutions – including UNCG – have come together to create a free online tool that documents that transformation and makes it available to the public.
The digital project – Textiles, Teachers, and Troops: Greensboro 1880-1945 – makes available more than 175,000 digital images including photographs, manuscripts, rare books, scrapbooks, printed materials and oral histories documenting the social and cultural development of Greensboro. For the first time, all five colleges and universities in Greensboro, along with the Greensboro Historical Museum, have collaborated on a project to make primary source materials available online.
The project was publicly launched last month at the Greensboro Historical Museum with a demonstration of the project website and a brief outline of Greensboro history during the period. Dr. Kevin Cherry, deputy secretary of archives and history in the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources, spoke.
And a few weeks ago, UNCG historians Lisa Tolbert and Anne Parsons, and PhD candidate Alexandra Chassanoff of UNC Chapel Hill, participated in a panel discussion “Historians, Digitization & the Future of Historical Research” at Jackson Library.
The project, coordinated by the Digital Projects unit in the University Libraries at UNCG, was made possible in large measure through funding from the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services.
The project incorporates material already digitized by the UNCG University Libraries and Greensboro Historical Museum as part of other projects, including Greensboro Historical Newspapers, Greensboro Pictorials and Greensboro City Directories.
The principal contacts for more information about the project are David Gwynn (jdgwynn@uncg.edu) and Stephen Catlett (jscatlet@uncg.edu).
Read the full story here.
By Barry Miller, University Libraries
Reposted from UNCG News & Features