Main Street, Carolina

Main Street, Carolina is a free, open-source, web-based digital history toolkit designed for local libraries, schools, museums, preservation and local history societies, and other community
organizations across N.C. to preserve, document, and interpret their history, as reflected in the growth and development of their downtowns in the first decades of the twentieth century (1896-1922). It provides organizational users with a flexible, user-friendly digital platform on which they can add a wide variety of “local” data: historical and contemporary photographs, postcards, newspaper ads and articles, architectural drawings, historical commentary, family papers, and audio and video files-all keyed to and layered on digitized historic maps.

MSC is a library/faculty collaboration developed by Professor Robert Allen and Wilson Library’s Carolina Digital Library and Archives (http://cdla.unc.edu/index.html). It was awarded the first C. Felix Harvey Award to Advance Institutional Priorities at UNC-CH (http://giving.unc.edu/harvey/) and is also supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Main Street, Carolina leverages the North Carolina Collection’s (UNC-Chapel Hill Library: http://www.lib.unc.edu/ncc/) outstanding archive of printed and published material about the state, including its complete collection of Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps for towns and cities in N.C. Sanborn maps are recognized as among the most important spatial records of the development of urban America, and they are the most requested maps at public and academic libraries in the U.S. These
large-scale, color urban ground plans, produced at roughly five year intervals for more than 12,000 towns in the U.S. between the 1880s and the 1930s, show every downtown structure, its dimensions, building material, and use. A number of state and university libraries have launched projects to digitize the Sanborn maps for their states, but MSC is the first (and, so far, only project) to digitally stitch individual map pages together to form a composite downtown view of a town or city a century ago, georeference that view so that it can be displayed using GIS systems, and utilize Google Maps and Google Earth as the user interface. In addition to the more than 1000 map pages representing the downtowns of forty-five strategically selected towns and cities in N.C. that have already have been digitized, electronically ”stitched” together, and geo-referenced (including all of the Sanborn
maps produced prior to 1923 for Charlotte, Wilmington, Durham, New Bern, Kinston, and Asheville, N.C., and covering more than 90% of the urban population of the state at the beginning of the 20th century), MSC also can be used with the more than 150 digitized and geo-referenced historic
overlay maps available through the North Carolina Maps project:
(http://www.lib.unc.edu/dc/ncmaps/interactive/overlay.html). MSC can also display content directly on contemporary Google map and satellite views.

MSC’s innovative system for displaying Sanborn maps builds on that developed for Going to the Show (www.docsouth.unc.edu/gtts), also developed by Professor Allen and CDLA, the first digital library to
document and illuminate the history of movie exhibition, including African-American movie theaters, for an entire state. Going to the Show locates the experience of moviegoing in North Carolina (1300 venues) on more than 1000 digitally stitched and georeferenced Sanborn Maps for 45 towns and cities. For his work on Going to the Show Professor Allen received one of the first Digital Humanities Fellowships awarded by the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2008.

MSC will be launched and available for download in the summer of 2010. Five demonstration projects involving collaborations with cultural heritage organizations across the state are underway. They include:

* “Sorting Out the New South City,” virtual reconstitution of Charlotte, N.C. in 1911, layering city directory data (including race, address, and occupation) for more than 5,000 residents and businesses on contemporaneous Sanborn maps (Levine Museum of the New South, Charlotte, N.C.), which will form the basis for museum programs in 2011 about the ”sorting out” of the city by race and class in the early years of the 20th century.

* “The Resurrection of Downtown New Bern,” digital showcase of successful historic preservation projects undertaken by Swiss Bear: private/public downtown redevelopment partnership (Swiss Bear, New Bern, N.C.) as a contribution to the 300th anniversary of the city’s founding

* “Recovering Hayti: Durham’s African American Downtown,” documenting key homes, businesses, and churches in Durham’s historic Hayti neighborhood (Preservation Durham, Durham, N.C.) in support of a 3-year project to document and obtain historic landmark status for black neighborhoods in Durham.

* “Picturing the Wilmington Waterfront,” digital library project displaying more than 250 historic photos of the Wilmington, N.C. waterfront (1820-1990) in conjunction with the opening of a new downtown civic center (New Hanover County Public Library, Wilmington, N.C.)

* “Franklin Street A Century Ago,” documentation of historic Franklin Street in 1911 and creation of digital content management system for local history museum (Chapel Hill Museum, Chapel Hill, N.C.)