no.2125-E-books & manuscripts from Chapel Hill

From: marcella grendler <spcl_at_email.unc.edu>

Subject: E-books and manuscripts from Chapel Hill


To:    The library community			

From:  Joe A. Hewitt
       Associate Provost for Libraries
       University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

September 17, 1999

I write to bring to your attention "Documenting the American
South," the
Academic Affairs Library's digitized and encoded full-text
collection of
works on Southern history and culture. They are freely
available to anyone
with Web access (http://metalab.unc.edu/docsouth/).  DAS
organizes works
by project:  "North American Slave Narratives;" "A Library
of Southern
Literature to 1920;"  "First-person Narratives of the
American South;" and
"The Southern Homefront, 1861-65."   This fall, "The Church
in the
Southern Black Community" begins.  More than 300 works are
now
electronically published, and current funding supports the
publication of
more than 500 additional books and manuscripts in the next
year and a
half.  

In 1996 the University of North Carolina Library celebrated
its
bicentennial as the nation's oldest state university
Library.   I
announced DAS as "our bicentennial gift to the university,
the state, and
the world."  It contained six works.  Three years later, its
value and its
potential are more apparent than ever.  Thanks to the
guidance of an
editorial board of campus scholars, we choose significant
works that
support formal teaching and research in American history and
culture.  But
we discovered that we also enrich the lives of thousands of
Web users who
read for recreation or personal enrichment.   Readers of all
kinds
accessed each html and sgml text from a few hundred to over
8,000 times
last fiscal year.   

DAS superbly fulfills our Library's public service
mission.   I am
committed to its long-term availability and continued
growth.   Digital
collections are difficult to establish and sustain, and I
welcome this
opportunity to share our work with the largest possible
community of
users.   I thank our outside funders:  the Delmas
Foundation, the
Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Library of
Congress/
Ameritech Program,  and the National Endowment for the
Humanities  for
critical support.  This is an opportunity to extend the
benefits of that
support.

I invite every library with access to OCLC to add to its own
online
catalog the 300 + MARC bibliographic records for the e-books
and
manuscripts now included in "Documenting the American
South."  Anyone with
Web access can read or download DAS titles.   A
bibliographic description
for each title is or will be available in OCLC's Online
Union Catalog.
Libraries with  web-based catalogs can establish a link from
the MARC
bibliographic record to the electronic text.  Bibliographic
information
and links are also available in OCLC's WorldCat public
database.