Z. Smith Reynolds Library

Kyle Denlinger

RootsMOOC: A Massive Open Online Course for Genealogy Research

Awarded $10,000 for the period 5/9/14 to 8/30/14

Source: State Library of North Carolina

Z. Smith Reynolds Library will partner with the Government and Heritage Library (GHL) of the State Library of North Carolina to create a free, massive open online course (MOOC) on genealogy research. Up to 5,000 participants from across the state and around the world will engage in an asynchronous online learning environment, interacting with, and learning from, their peers, librarians, archivists, and genealogists while learning about important genealogy resources and techniques. All course materials will be licensed for reuse in future courses, both face-to-face and online, by anyone who chooses to use them.

Megan Mulder

Religion in North Carolina digital collection

Awarded $1,500 for the period 7/9/14 to 5/30/15

Source: State Library of North Caronlina/Duke University

The Religion in North Carolina digital collection gathers, preserves, and provides access to 8000 volumes representing every county of the state, including the collections of the project partners, and enriched by unique materials from over 200 public, university, and college libraries and archives. Digitized materials will be made available through the Internet Archive and promoted through a project website that will include critical tools, including lesson plans and interpretive essays, and connections to other resources.

Susan Smith

Biblical Recorder Digitization Outsourcing Project

Awarded $75,000 for the period 7/1/10 to 6/30/11

Source: State Library of North Carolina

The library owns one of the most complete collections of the 175-year-old Biblical Recorder, the organ of the North Carolina Baptist State Convention, both in microfilm and paper. The 122 microfilm rolls are heavily used for research on a wide range of subjects significant to North Carolina’s history and culture, and access requires in-person visits to the library. This project aims to digitize the content and make it freely available on the internet. Olive Software uses an innovative automated process to produce rich XML data that is fully searchable while retaining the original look and feel of the print document.  Researchers will have unprecedented search capabilities at the page, article, picture, and ad level.

Preserving Forsyth’s Past Outreach Program

Awarded $33,151 for the period 7/1/09 to 6/30/10

Source: State Library of North Carolina

Z. Smith Reynolds Library (ZSR) and Forsyth County Public Library will reach out to small Forsyth County organizations to educate them about how to organize and preserve their cultural heritage materials. It will establish public digitization centers, equipped with software and trained staff, to remediate barriers to preserving important local history.

Digital Forsyth

Awarded $90,117 for the period 7/1/08 to 6/30/09

Source: Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS); State of North Carolina

Z. Smith Reynolds Library, Coy C. Carpenter Library at the School of Medicine, the Winston-Salem State University Archives at C. G. O’Kelly Library, and the Forsyth County Public Library will develop a comprehensive online digital collection of photographs pertaining to the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century history of Forsyth County. The partners will produce a virtual collection with greater value and access to citizens, students, scholars, and lifelong learners as a collective whole than would be possible through isolated, individual efforts. Photographs focus on people, places, businesses, and institutions in Winston-Salem and Forsyth County of great significance to North Carolina’s cultural heritage.

Digital Forsyth Collaborative Project Planning Grant

Awarded: $11,992

Source: State Library of North Carolina

Funds support a consultant to help Z. Smith Reynolds Library plan a collaborative digitization project with its two partners, Forsyth Public Library and Winston-Salem State University’s C. G. O’Kelly Library. Each institution has a rich collection of unique resources that document a wide range of events and topics in the historical, socioeconomic, and cultural development of Forsyth County. The partners plan to produce a virtual collection of greater value as a collective whole than individual efforts.

The project will focus on:

• making significant cultural resources more accessible by using new digital technologies and the Internet;
• providing librarians/archivists with the education necessary to develop and to manage subsequent digital projects; and
• developing a solid foundation for continued collaboration between three of the major cultural repositories in the Winston-Salem area to respond to community needs for improved library services.

Special Collections Finding-Aid Conversion

Awarded $20,700 for the period 7/1/04 to 6/30/05

Source: State Library of North Carolina

Z. Smith Reynolds Library aims to convert all of its 530 paper-based, special collection guides into electronic documents that will be available over the Internet and through the library’s online catalog. Some of the encoding will be outsourced, while ZSR Library staff undertake pre- and postprocessing activities to ensure that the converted materials are accurate and useful and gain proficiency with the encoding techniques for future projects. Accomplishing the retrospective digitization of existing paper-based guides will allow future local efforts to focus on creating new finding aids as they are written.

EZ Grant LSTA Project Planning

Awarded $22,000 for the period 2/1/03 to 9/30/03

Source: State Library of North Carolina

Funds will support a consultant, who will help the library prepare a strategic plan to digitize parts of the collection. Many unique materials can be made much more accessible via the internet, and, at the same time, digitization will help to preserve fragile materials by limiting the need to handle them.

Tanya Zanish-Belcher

EZ digitization grant: Digitizing archival materials from the NC Baptist Historic Collection

Awarded $15,235 for the period 7/1/15 to 6/30/16

Source: IMLS/State Library of North Carolina

Nearly 100 linear feet of original archival records belonging to 120 churches throughout North Carolina and dating back to the 18^th century will be made available as part of the Z. Smith Reynolds Library’s online Baptist collection. They will join the Biblical Recorder (digitized by Olive Software) and Baptist monographs and serials digitized by the Religion in North Carolina grant project, a collaboration with Duke University and UNC-Chapel Hill. Genealogists, researchers and scholars from all over the world use these collections, which elucidate North Carolina Baptist culture and history and the role religion played in state development.

Preservation Assistance Grants for Smaller Institutions

Awarded $5,400 for the period 1/1/15 to 6/30/16

Source: National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)

The library will conduct a preservation assessment of its archives and special collections, with particular attention to its storage facilities. Materials include 11,000 linear feet of historical records and manuscripts and 70,000 rare books, with particular strengths in Irish, modernist, and African American literature. Sources include the papers of author and Civil Rights activist Maya Angelou, who taught at Wake Forest from 1982 to 2011, and records of several North Carolina Baptist churches and associated worldwide missionary efforts.