Resource of the Month: NC Digital Collections

North Carolina Digital Collections

 

Are you trying to recall an article in the May, 1989 edition of Our State (that you rightly recycled in July 1991)? Are you just generally curious about North Carolina’s history? You can revisit old memories and satisfy your curiosity by visiting the North Carolina Digital Collections.

The North Carolina Digital Collections describe themselves this way:

The North Carolina Digital Collections contain over 90,000 historic and recent photographs, state government publications, manuscripts, and other resources on topics related to North Carolina. The Collections are free and full-text searchable, and bring together content from the State Archives of North Carolina and the State Library of North Carolina.

Multiple search options on the homepage allow you to search everything hosted on the site or to narrow your search to individual collections. For casual browsing or searching, the home page offers suggestions like Genealogy, Civil War, and Census Data for searching and Time Period or NC Places for browsing. If you are like me, you might be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information on the site and unsure where to start. In that case, just hit the “Surprise Me” button and the site will take you to a random spot, and you can wade in from there.

Scroll down just a bit and you will see summaries of many of the collections offered by North Carolina Digital Collections. Many of the collections (the aforementioned Our State magazine, for example) feature full scans of every page, so visiting the collection is just like perusing actual copies of the material, minus the dust!

To access the collection, point your browser to http://digital.ncdcr.gov. No sign-in is required.

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