Jackie Dean

New Finding Aid Design

You might have noticed that some of the finding aids for the Southern Historical Collection have a new look. Thanks to the hard work of Special Collections Technical Services TRA Joyce Chapman, the finding aid re-design has been implemented. We hope that the new finding aid display will be user-friendly and easy-to-navigate.

This new display applies to approximately half of our finding aids; some finding aids will still look the same.  We are working towards converting all of our finding aids to the new design.

Please let us know if you notice any problems with this new presentation. We’d like to find and fix all of the glitches this summer while Joyce is still working for us. One bug that we will fix ASAP is that Internet Explorer chokes on longer finding aids. They take some time to load and it is difficult to scroll through them.

Please email us at mss@email.unc.edu if you see anything in the new design that looks strange.

Here are a few examples:

Taylor Branch Papers:
http://www.lib.unc.edu/mss/inv/b/Branch,Taylor.html

Cameron Family Papers:
http://www.lib.unc.edu/mss/inv/c/Cameron_Family.html

Delta and Providence Cooperative Farms Papers
http://www.lib.unc.edu/mss/inv/d/Delta_and_Providence_Cooperative_Farms.html

New SOHP Database

The Southern Historical Collection is pleased to present the new Southern Oral History Program (SOHP) interview database, at http://www.lib.unc.edu/dc/sohp/?CISOROOT=/sohp.

The new site provides users with even greater search capabilities and functionality. Most importantly, we now have the ability to deliver digital content on the Web. In addition to the 500+ interviews already delivered digitally by the IMLS funded Documenting the American South’s digital collection Oral Histories of the American South, users can now access another 330 digital transcripts as well as approximately 290 digital audio interviews from the new site. These numbers will only continue to grow.

The new site includes a number of browse pages (Interviewee, Interviewer, Project, Occupation, Subject, and Ethnicity), as well as the old site’s keyword searches. A powerful advanced search is available from the main Libraries digital collections search page as well.

We invite comments and feedback on the new database.