Mooresville Public Library is bringing the past into the present by offering many of the oral histories, photographs, and other items within its Special Collections department available online.
“This is the second phase in the Digital Mooresville Project,” said Andy Poore, curator of Special Collections for the library. “This phase offers researchers the ability to do online research of family members, the history of Mooresville, obituaries, oral histories and much more.”
The Digital Mooresville Project was created to meet the needs of the community, the Town of Mooresville, and the library in order to make more of the history of the town, the community, and the surrounding area accessible to a new generation of patrons and researchers, Poore said.
He first started the project four years ago gathering up information and Mooresville history to eventually be transferred online. Poore admits that searching for this information requires patience. Currently searches can be make from a route directory system of the library catalog which Poore said will be corrected in time.
“We are in the early stages of this second phase and searching for information requires a little time,” he said. “I’ve redone the web page to make it more user friendly, but there’s still a lot to do.”
Special Collections has even transferred issues of the Tribune dating back to 1904 to user-friendly, PDF digital formats. Each paper Poore has uploaded onto the Digital Mooresville web page has been placed in its own individual file.
“Just having the Mooresville Tribune in digital file formats allows users the option to browse for information remotely without having to use a microfilm reader in the library building,” he said.
Poore hopes the site will eventually be content searchable, but for right now searching through the newspapers will take a while longer.
“I won’t be able to do that with papers dating from 1923 and back and a few forward because the film content has been used so much,” he said. “It’s still readable but scratches on the film will throw the program off.”
Poore has even uploaded a photo from 1875 after taking a digital image of it because of the fragile state the photo is in. Several videos of oral histories are also available on the site and can be searched by individuals names.
The curator hopes to have other newspapers, photographs, documents, donated genealogies, and other searchable content in a more user-friendly format on the Special Collections web page.
“Visitors will be able to virtually walk the shelves and search the site just like they would for a book in the card catalog,” he said.
Digital Mooresville is an on-going project to make thousands of photographs, documents, and histories of Mooresville and the surrounding area available to the public.
Poore is still asking for donated items not just for Digital Mooresville but for library purposes as well to preserve them.
“Items don’t have to be extremely old, new historical events are welcomed too,” he said. “I just want to help preserve original items because once their gone their gone and they can’t be readily made available.”
To access the library’s online catalog to search the new added items within special collections visit www.MooresvilleLibrary.org or at www.DigitalMooresville.org.
For more information or to donate/loan items to Special Collections, contact Poore at 704-664-4315 or apoore@ci.mooresville.nc.us.
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