Government and Heritage Library Blog, from the State Library of North Carolina
The Spring 2013 edition of the Digital Insider is now available on the State Library web site.
http://statelibrary.ncdcr.gov/ghl/news/di/2013_0601.pdf
Take a look to find out what’s new with NCPedia, the digital collections, and the digital world at large!
Staff in the Digital Information Management Program at the Government & Heritage Library have finished integrating the over 1900 entries from the University of North Carolina Press’s Encyclopedia of North Carolina into NCpedia! They are now available and searchable at http://ncpedia.org.
Additional information about this expansion of NCpedia may be found at http://news.ncdcr.gov/2013/02/15/encyclopedia-of-north-carolina-available-online-through-ncpedia/.
The expansion has been made possible through a Library Services and Technology Act grant from the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services.
As of February 1,2013, NCpedia contained 3,198 entries and 3,872 images.
The Digital Information Management Program is always looking for new project partners for NCpedia. If you have information you would like to contribute to NCpedia about your local area, institution, or research interests, or if you have ideas on how to make NCpedia even better, please contact us. Contact information is available at http://www.ncpedia.org/contact.
If you attended school in North Carolina, then chances are you’ve had the opportunity to participate in the North Carolina Symphony’s educational concert program. The Government and Heritage Library is very pleased to provide access to a new online collection of the student guidebooks, originally titled Symphony Stories, which were given to children as part of that program. The North Carolina Symphony’s music education program began in 1945, with the combined efforts of then Music Director Benjamin Swalin, his wife Maxine, and Director of Education Adeline McCall. The program is designed to introduce students to the fundamentals of music, musical terminology, the instruments of the orchestra, and the concert repertoire, culminating in a live performance by the North Carolina Symphony.
Dating back to 1947, these booklets give students a look into composers’ lives, teach proper concert behavior, and provide an introduction to the music they will hear in their live concert. They include the concert’s program as well as wonderful images and snippets of music scores. The Symphony Stories provide a fascinating look back at the North Carolina Symphony’s history and the great work they’ve done bringing music to the lives of millions of children.
open government, by flickr user opensourceway
Since 2005, the State Library and State Archives have partnered to capture, or “harvest,” North Carolina state government web sites through a fantastic service: Archive-It. Today, citizens of North Carolina (indeed, users anywhere) can browse through those sites going back to 1996 through our North Carolina State Government Web Site Archive & Access Program (WSAAP). This program is one of the most robust and longest running in the nation (we’re pretty proud of it).
With the rise of government’s use of social media, we took our responsibility to collect the record of government seriously and expanded our harvesting to include sites like flickr, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook. Blogs are in there, too. Recently, we’re excited to announce that we’ve expanded our program through a North Carolina company called ArchiveSocial.
An example of an interaction on Facebook, captured by ArchiveSocial
If you think about it, social media sites are a lot more interactive than your typical website. They give government employees and the public a chance for one-on-one, even realtime interactions. Because the technology can vary from site to site, we added ArchiveSocial to our toolset to help us capture even more information, so you know that the archive you’re looking at is the same information that we got in the beginning.
Some folks have questioned the need to archive social media – most famously following the Library of Congress’ efforts to archive Twitter. But we believe that social media has allowed average users to approach officials faster and more frankly than ever before, and that’s something we want future North Carolinians to be able to study and see.
Right now, our ArchiveSocial data is in BETA – only a few accounts have been added. Please try it out and let us know what you think. We’ve gotten great feedback so far, and will be adding more in the months to come. You can also check our WSAAP for more social media going back to 2009.
What do you think about archiving social media in government?
This blog is a service of the State Library of North Carolina, part of the NC Department of Cultural Resources. Blog comments and posts may be subject to Public Records Law and may be disclosed to third parties.
