Determining the Core Issues
Every archive has particular key issues that are central to its holdings and that transcend the geographic and chronological breadth of its collections. For southern history, perhaps no issue is more critical to an understanding of the region's past, or is more actively studied, than the issue of race relations between white southerners and African Americans. In the Exit Survey, one scholar who advocated beginning with the digitization of older, handwritten documents recommended prioritizing "collections that include information about or by African American / enslaved people + within the chronological framework."
Focusing on the African American experience for the initial digitization will tie in with the SHC's collecting initiatives, and with ongoing projects that involve uncovering documentation of African Americans in existing collections and promoting use of those collections. These initiatives include rewriting the finding aids for ten of the SHC's collections with substantial African American content and a project to publish an interactive guide to African American holdings in the SHC directed by Holly Smith, the Overholser Fellow in African American Studies. Concentrating on collections related to race does not mean, however, that only those collections with a primary focus on race will be digitized. Rather, the SHC staff cast a very broad net in determining which collections include some content focused on this issue, and decided that any content based on race within a given collection merited inclusion of the entire collection.
After surveying the SHC's collections, it was determined that 1,030 collections will be included using race-related content to prioritize collections. The prioritized collections demonstrate the enormous variety of the SHC, containing materials as diverse as plantation and farm journals; physician account books; cotton mill records; letters from federal and Confederate soldiers; diaries of ministers, women, social activists, and children; church records; household accounts; store ledgers; and sociologists' field notes.
Although a collection may be selected for digitization on the basis of its content related to race, it may also be tremendously valuable to scholars studying unrelated topics, thus extending its value far beyond the considerable number of scholars interested in southern race relations. For example, the Cameron Family Papers—one of the most well-known and widely used collections of plantation manuscripts in the SHC—would clearly merit inclusion in the initial digitization effort using race-related content as a criterion because of its many documents related to slavery. However, the Cameron Family Papers have been used not only by numerous researchers interested in American slavery, but also by scholars studying many other issues including gender in the Old South, parenting practices among North Carolina planters, folk medicine, the Civil War, the nineteenth-century global economy, the North Carolina railroad, southern architecture, literacy, and Jews in the American South.