Digital Forsyth Forsyth County, North Carolina

We’ve all been working hard lately. The User Services Group has been evaluating a series of prototype interfaces (we’re planning on releasing a public interface in the fall), enhancing navigation, and moving towards greater integrated discovery, including thematic and contextual narratives. Our metadata catalogers continue to improve and refine the faceted photograph descriptions. Everything is looking good.

Everyone’s been busy lately adding descriptions, subjects, and other details to the images we scanned for the pilot project.  Next steps include designing a prototype interface based on the results of the pilot.

In the next few weeks, we will begin working on a small pilot project, designed to test our project workflow and infrastructure. Each partner institution will be scanning 50 images. We’re looking forward to getting started and hopefully we’ll have a few images online soon.

From the official news release…

Staff at Forsyth County’s largest libraries – Wake Forest University’s Z. Smith Reynolds Library and Coy C. Carpenter Medical Library, the Forsyth County Public Library and Winston-Salem State’s C. G. O’Kelly Library – will undertake a historic collaboration in an effort to preserve the photographic history of Forsyth County in an easy-to-use, computerized format.

The library coalition has secured a federal grant for equipment and staffing to scan and digitize photographic images as part of a “Digital Forsyth” project. The grant was awarded by the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) through the Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA), administered by the State Library of North Carolina. The coalition received $75,000 for the first year of what is hoped to be a three-year, $225,000 “Digital Forsyth” project.

For more information, see full news release.