"Brunswick Stew p. 28"

Marginalia can tell us many things about the previous owners of a volume. In some cases, such as this note in the cookbook A Collection of Favorite Recipes, they can even tell us about the owners' favorite foods.

This note was handwritten on the cover, providing a quick reminder for where to find the Brunswick Stew recipe. Turning to page 28, we find that:


Mrs. H. H. Moore's Brunswick Stew recipe (not to be confused with Mrs. L. D. Moore's Brunswick Stew recipe right below it) is marked with an asterisk, which may correspond to the note on the front page.

A Collection of Favorite Recipes was compiled by the Women's Society of Christian Service at Hayes Barton Methodist Church in Raleigh. Created to raise funds for equipping a new kitchen, the cookbook contains recipes submitted by the parishioners. Feel free to flip through this item and look for recipes such as "Coffee Punch," "Old Virginia Spoon Bread," "Frankfurter Casserole," "Chicken Wiggle" or "Spanish Eggplant," as well as a wide variety of interesting local ads. Or head on over to the NC Religion collection on the Internet Archive, and check out our other cookbooks and items related to religious life and culture in North Carolina.

NC Religion goes to NOLA!

Just a few friendly acronyms for your Monday morning...

This past week, I ventured to annual meeting of SAA, Society of American Archivists, which was held in New Orleans this year. The meeting was jointly sponsored by CoSA, Council of State Archivists. Thankfully, the weather was kind and not too humid for August in the fascinating, but often steamy and sticky, city of New Orleans.

I presented a poster entitled "Spreading the Faith: An Analysis of Social Media and the NC Religion Digitization Project" during the graduate student poster sessions. This was another wonderful opportunity to inform people and professionals of the project.

If you haven't already, check out the Internet Archive collection, our Facebook page and our Google+ page. There is primary material for those conducting research and neat information for those interested in casual browsing. Should you need a little inspiration, here are a couple of my favorite items! As always, we'd love to hear from you, be it in the form of comments, questions or suggestions by way of social media or e-mail.

NC Religion at The American Theological Library Association

The Duke Divinity School Library Staff attended the American Theological Library Association Annual Conference in The Queen City of Charlotte, North Carolina last week. Project Coordinator, Shanee Murrain presented a poster "The Religion in North Carolina Digital Collection: Content, Audience, and Presentation. The presentation featured background about the project planning grant, scope and audience, organizing content and workflow, copyright analysis, incidences of impact, digital output and Black Church identity politics as reflected in meeting minutes and church histories. Everyone wanted to know about the grant! Fellow librarians shared their interest and excitement about the digital collection. A few even asked Shanee to consult on their archival programs.

They are all so engaged!

Overall the conference was a success! The poster presentation and attendance at the Methodist Librarian's Fellowship meeting gave us the opportunity to share with and learn from a variety of theological libraries accessing their own collections for mass digitization.    

NC Religion Project Stats

This first year of digitizing materials is winding to a close. So here are a few statistics from the project.

As of June 13, 2013, there are 2,180 items online at the Religion in North Carolina Internet Archive Collection.

As of June 2, 2013, the download stats by month:

866 downloads in October 2012
1,319 downloads in November 2012
2,867 downloads in December 2012
6,065 downloads in January 2013
4,799 downloads in February 2013
9,902 downloads in March 2013
7,705 downloads in April 2013
10,822 downloads in May 2013

As of June 13, 2013, Duke has 305,933 pages online and UNC-Chapel Hill has 146,235 pages online and 287 foldouts online.

We are excited to continue scanning and sharing these materials! And we are glad to see that people are using the digitized items. If you are interested in the collection, but haven't yet seen it for yourself, navigate over to our page on Internet Archive.

Religion Around the State

Although the NC Religion project strives to provide a substantive body of religious materials virtually through the Internet Archive, here are a few links to organizations around the state of North Carolina with religious materials that might be of interest to researchers. This is, of course, by no means a comprehensive and authoritative inventory. If there are other organizations like archives, historical societies, museums, libraries and so forth that hold items relevant to religion in North Carolina, let us know in the comments below. We would be happy to add them to the post, which can serve as a running list instead. In no particular order:

Moravian Church Archives located in Winston-Salem. According to their website, the archive hosts over a million pages of handwritten documents including industrial, commercial, civic, ecclesiastical, educational, medical and musical-related records in addition to diaries, correspondence, ethnographic materials, prints, broadsides, photographs and maps. The archive also has a library with 1,600 titles primarily from the 18th century.

Southeastern Jurisdiction of the United Methodist Church in Lake Junaluska features a museum along with records of the Southeastern Jurisdiction, journals and newspapers covering the SEJ Annual Conference, local church histories, biographical information on clergy and a variety of relevant books.

North Carolina Conference of The United Methodist Church in Garner provides records on the Annual Conference, information for local church historians and a digital archive.

The Levine-Sklut Judaic Library and Resource Center in Charlotte is connected to the Jewish Historical Society of Greater Charlotte. The library and resource center hold "photographs, letters, brochures, scrapbooks" and other print materials that represent Jewish life and community in and around Charlotte.

Jewish Heritage Foundation of North Carolina in Durham unifies projects covering Jewish history throughout North Carolina. The site presents a network of statewide resources for those interested in Jewish heritage.

Friends Historical Collection in Greensboro is a collection from the Hege Library at Guilford College. Guilford was founded by Religious Society of Friends in 1837. This collection houses records on the North Carolina Yearly meetings, monthly meetings and other important meetings in the region. Additionally, the collection acts as the main archive for the Quaker House of Fayetteville and the North Carolina Friends Historical Society. The library possesses manuscripts from Quaker individuals and families.

Church History Collection in Elon at the Belk Special Collections Library at Elon University offers items connected to the Christian Church. Records range from church histories to meeting minutes to audio-visual materials to church periodicals.

Presbyterian Collection and Theological Seminary Collection in Charlotte at Johnson C. Smith University. The Presbyterian Collection includes records, such as church bulletins, correspondence, church histories and information concerning the Catawba Synod that demonstrate ties between the University and local Presbyterian churches. The Theological Seminary Collection is comprised of records on the University's Seminary from the early 1900s to 1969. In 1969 the seminary relocated to Atlanta. The records consist of newsletters, annual reports and administrative correspondence.

Top Five NC Religion Items

Since we have been adding digitized materials to the Internet Archive for several months now, let's take a look at our all-time most downloaded items...



1. Presbyterian Orphans' Home at Barium Springs, North Carolina: an album of memories with 386 downloads

2. Annual of the...annual session of the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina (Volume 127th 129th (1957-1959) c. 1) with 356 downloads

3. Annual of the...annual session of the Baptist State Convention of the North Carolina (Volume 138th (1968) c. 1)  with 324 downloads

4. Rock Spring Campground (Volume v. 2) with 249 downloads

5. Annual of the...annual session of the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina (Volume 88th 91st (1918-1921) c.1) with 209 downloads

These are only the top five items, and they may shift as more materials are added to the Internet Archive. If you're curious to see more of the most accessed titles, check out the home page and click on the more option for a full listing.

Last week, Presbyterian Orphan Home was still the most downloaded item with 25 downloads and Baptist State Convention (1968) was the 5th most downloaded item with 17 downloads. Other popular items included:

2. Journal of the Western N.C. Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South [serial] (Volume 44th 47th (1933-1936)) with 21 downloads

3. Methodist Protestant Herald, 1935 with 19 downloads

4. Journal of the Western N.C. Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South (Volume 1953-1955) with 17 downloads

Currently, we have a total of 2,106 items ready and waiting to be downloaded. If you happen to stop by this blog, we would love to hear what materials you have (or hope to!) looked at and/or downloaded, what you are planning to use the materials for and what types of materials interest you the most.

Happy downloading!

Carolina Baptist News and the Problem of Margins

 
Here is one more quick item spotlight. We digitized this material a few months back but I had forgotten to share it on the blog until now. The item in question is a serial in four volumes called Carolina Baptist News. This serial was particularly memorable because it used colorful paper and images and had many neat ads and foldout pages bound in with the newsletters. One of the project members remarked on the homegrown quality of serial. It is mind-boggling to think of how quickly publication layouts and conventions have changed thanks to computers. Above is volume one of four (go check out all four on the Internet Archive!). Here is a link to the March/April 2013 Carolina Baptist News. You can find several recent back issues on their site if you are interested.

You might notice that the margins on this serial are a bit wonky in places. To digitize materials, we need around a 1/4 inch space in the margins so that everything comes out clearly. However, sometimes that is a struggle with certain materials for a variety of reasons. We do our best to solve these problems, but if nothing can be done we tend to err on side of digitization regardless. Although some text can be lost, we want to share as much information as possible. Generally, even if a little bit is missing, items can still be read. More than anything our aim is for access. Anyway, that's just one of the possible snags in selecting and preparing items for digitization. The creators had no way of knowing how their products would be used in the future so they did not care how close their text was to the margins. Ideas like that can get you wondering how a few generations down the road people might be manipulating our documents in an entirely different fashion. But that's an endless what-if game.