Today I discovered an excellent new online resource. The South Carolina Digital Library is a collaborative project between several agencies, organizations, and colleges which brings together several digital libraries. The collections include historical images, documents, audio, and other ephemera. These items are still housed in their previous locations, but the SC Digital Library brings all of these together in a simple, searchable user interface. The project is based on the same concept as the American Memory Project from the Library of Congress.
One of my favorite collections is the Historic Images of Greenville. There’s also a collection of postcards, and the Sanborn Insurance Collection, which includes images of lots of historic schools.
I really like browsing the state map. Users can select a county, then view all of the items available for that county. I could easily lose hours looking through the collections. Very cool, indeed.
Oh, Tom, that’s a wonderful site. I went straight to the photo collections. Did you see the photo of the Bon Marche store (in Greenville?).
Life looks hard in these photos. People in old photos of South Carolina often look to be struggling. Or maybe my eyes read that into them, knowing what the economy was like between the Civil War and, well, the 1970’s.