Do you hear the sounds (whirs and hums) of books being digitized in the Duke Divinity School Library? In October, the Duke Divinity School library welcomed the arrival of an Internet Archive Scribe scanner. In just a matter of hours, Internet Archive staff turned metal poles and gadgetry into a fully-operational book scanner. The scanner is operated by satellite lead and scribe operator, Osamu Sueyoshi. The scanner will help facilitate the digitizing of thousands of books for the LSTA grant-funded project, The Religion in North Carolina Digital Collection. Book scanning for the project has been underway since September at partner institution, UNC-Chapel Hill. Materials from Duke’s Rubenstein Library and other campus libraries will be handled by the existing Internet Archive Scribe operation in the Digital Production Center.
Osamu testing one of the first books
What are we digitizing? The Religion in North Carolina Digital Collection seeks to bring together, preserve, and provide access to 8,000 volumes of the main materials of religious bodies from every county in the state. The collection will include the histories of local religious bodies, as well as the publications of larger North Carolina religious organizations and associations.
The materials are organized into the following sub-collections:
- Church and Religious Body Histories
- Church and Religious Body Histories relating to Religion in North Carolina
- Clergy Autobiographical and Biographical Materials: Journals, Testimonies, etc.
- Ephemerals: Cookbooks, Event Programs, and Directories
- Meetings, Proceedings, and Conference Reports
- Newsletters, Newspapers and Serial Publications
- Sermons of North Carolina
Where are the books coming from? Materials will be digitized primarily from the collections of project partners (UNC-Chapel Hill, Wake Forest University, and Duke University), but the project will also draw from the unique materials represented in the collections of over 200 public, university, and college libraries and archives in North Carolina and elsewhere.
- Digitized books from the project can be viewed here: http://archive.org/details/ncreligion
- Project updates can be found on our blog: http://ncreligion.blogspot.com/
Are you interested in learning more about the project? Contact our Project Coordinator, Shaneé Murrain (smurrain@div.duke.edu), to learn more about our on-the-ground operations or arrange a tour of our digitization “suite”!
The grant for the collection is made possible through funding from the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by the State Library of North Carolina, a division of the Department of Cultural Resources.
If you enjoyed this article, please consider sharing it!
