Day Five--NC Room

9:00 am - 12:30 pm
3.5 hours
Total hours to date: 25

Today, I spent my entire time in the NC room with Gale, the curator, and I was able to work on a variety of jobs. I started out shelving materials (books, archived materials, and vertical files) and recording statistics. There are so many various types of information contained in this room, it is truly amazing and complex. It will take a while to truly understand where everything is kept. I also looked up names and contact information for all the Social Studies department chairs at each of the county's high schools for the Genealogical Society.

I helped Gale locate information to help a patron (from Pennsylvania) who had requested genealogy information via email. That was easily the most interesting and exciting part of the day. The patron wanted information about a possible family connection to a specific road and a church in the county. Using Burke County Heritage volumes 1 and 2, vertical file--church history, and Edward Phifer's History of Burke County, we were able to trace the history of the family name connection to the road and church, and I made copies for Gale to send to the patron.

Gale also showed me several photographs that a patron had emailed to donate to the Picture Burke Project. She will need to contact the patron and explain that the library would be unable to use the digital photos in their current form because the resolution is too low for the Picture Burke standards. She will request that the patron bring in the originals, if possible, so that they may be scanned at the proper resolution.

While I was there, a gentleman who works at the Burke County History Museum came in to let us know about a past special edition of The News Herald that he wanted to see if we had a copy of in the NC Room. It is from March 30, 1997, Section H, "Images of Burke II," and contains 14 pages of historical information and photographs of black schools in the county. He thought this might be a good resource for patrons. Gale found this issue in the vertical file, but the section H was missing. She isn't sure if it had once been included but was removed or if it was never part of the collection. We agreed that it would be worth pursuing to try and get a copy for the library. That led to a discussion with Gale about The News Herald's lack of archived copies of the newspaper. I learned that some newspapers have a "morgue" or collection of previous editions of the newspaper that can be used for reference and that The News Herald once had such a collection but decided to throw these away at some point. Now, the only archived copies of the News Herald are contained in the state archives or at the library--Microfilm or clipped articles in the vertical file. Gale is currently seeking funding for a project in which old reels of microfilm (containing the newspaper archives) will be digitized and will become searchable online, after receiving original approval and enough funding to get started. I hope to help her get this project underway. She will be sending off 40 reels for digitization soon and will be seeking grant money to expand this project. Both of us feel like this is a worthwhile project that has great potential for library patrons both in Burke County and elsewhere.