To say those from the South are proud of their heritage is putting it mildly. Every year dozens if not hundreds of groups, towns and culture centers celebrate some aspect of Southern life from Civil War reenactments to living history villages to a wide array of festivals honoring everything from fruit and food to music and specialty local events. ¹

To help commemorate the South’s (and also America’s) illustrious background and to give a voice to the Southern perspective, the University of North Carolina has put together a digital initiative of primary and secondary sources on the Internet. Since 2004, Documenting the American South has been the premier location for education and research materials on Southern life not just on the Internet, but also in the world. The fourteen thematic collections offer wide range of digital materials that includes books, diaries, posters, artifacts, letters, oral history interviews, and songs. This vibrant digital collection consists of numerous large print, photograph and rare materials collections made possible by Southern Historical Collection, the North Carolina Collection, UNC’s Rare Book Collectionand the Davis Library.

What makes Documenting the American South such a rich resource is not just because of the various large collections that have been consolidated into a single landing point for research and discovery rather it is also because the scope, design and ease of use of the site that makes it such a valuable resource. In addition, the site is consistantly updated with new information and materials, making it not only a valuable resource for things past, but also for things present and future.

Documenting the American South has a number of discovery and mapping tools to help viewers explore the collection. This includes a Highlights section, a monthly update that explores content in the collection, which is also available via RSS. In addition is the Collections section, a listing of the digital collections by theme, also available for researchers and educators to use for finding materials that range from first person narratives, slave narratives to Southern literature and more. Specific content can also be found by using the Subjects, Geographical, Authors and Titles tabs in the top navigation bar. And if you still can’t find what you’re looking for, there is also a search option to search the entire collection by keyword to find exactly what you need.

UNC has also put together Classroom Resources, which includes kits, lesson plans and additional materials to help bring Southern life vividly into the classroom.

This is a wonderful treasure trove of materials, that is not only rich for discovery but also a valuable archive of not just Southern life, but American life as well.

1. In addition, Southern Festivals is a fantastic resource for festivals happening in the South. This site is organized by state, so if you’re traveling south this year and looking for things to do, this would definitely be one site you want to bookmark.

Since the advent of the Internet, floodgates have opened with people creating all forms of documents put on the web. And with open source and proprietary software, the proliferation of websites and blogs has been nearly overwhelming. But will all that material be around a year or five from now? What will exist in the future? How will it be archived? Internet content creators cannot be certain that their material will be around for years to come. A lot of people might be OK with that, but if they do want their sites around for posterity, they should be proactive in saving their works.

Although “good-faith relationships” typically exist between users and the Internet service providers, the records actually belong to the latter, and most of them do not archive all the websites in perpetuity. In 1997, Tom Hyry and Rachel Onuf wrote in Archival Issues, “From multimedia projects to personal homepages and beyond, new expressive digital media proliferate. Since content in these formats, too, can be easily altered over time, the past forms, looks, and contents of these documents become replaced, and normally lost, with the developments of their replacements.”

Another consideration is when “sponsoring organizations” of Internet sites cease to exist, like for political campaigns, so the digital contents may depart as well. This happened to Al Gore’s website after the 2000 election was finally called. Of course there is the Internet Archive and its Wayback Machine to view various websites, but it does not have everything, nor are all the links active. Brewster Kahle created the Internet Archive in 1996. According to its website, it contains almost two petabytes of data and is currently growing at a rate of 20 terabytes per month. “This eclipses the amount of text contained in the world’s largest libraries, including the Library of Congress.” But Kahle acknowledges, in a 2007 American Archivist article, that “digital technologies erode very quickly. The current digital technologies only last about three years. In the last ten years, we’ve moved – transitioned – our materials three times.”

There continues to be concern about whole companies’ sites disappearing. For example, Driveway.com, a provider of free web-based digital storage, had approximately two million users. The company then announced its “demise” giving people a two-week notice to move their files. If those customers did not see the notice, they lost all their material.

There is a risk of disappearance for even the more prominent websites. For instance, on January 20, 2001, Inauguration Day, the White House website had changed completely with the incoming president. However, the previous contents of the Clinton administration’s site, and its searchable archive companion site, were “completely wiped clean.” Called “link rot,” thousands of links within other websites were broken. Not only did this create issues for the general public who may have wanted to research material from and about Clinton’s tenure, but archivists and historians know such material is vital to analyze a presidency. Fortunately, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) took action to preserve various “renditions” of those sites which were taken down. This is recounted in the article “Digital Preservation: Paradox & Promise” by R. Wiggins in Library Journal Net Connect from 2001.

Some computerized material and electronic records are difficult to preserve and access since they are “born digital.” As more documents are authored in a digital form, some of that material cannot be reduced to print, at least not without “substantial loss of content or function,” according to Clifford Lynch, Executive Director of the Coalition for Networked Information. These documents also create other issues for archivists such as making sure works like digital photographs that might be accessioned into an archival database have metadata added to them so correct cataloging information can be kept.

The Internet Archive, amongst all its electronic pages of information, warns that when it comes to preservation, “any medium or site used to store data is potentially vulnerable to accidents and natural disasters.” And with the news reported on October 12 that a division of Microsoft, called Danger, had a server crash leaving users of its Sidekick device without their photos and other personal information, this just reinforces the vulnerability of all the electronic material that deluges the Internet.