Thursday, July 17, 2014

Historic UNC Asheville student newspapers available online through DigitalNC

Over 500 issues of UNC Asheville student newspapers are now available online through the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center's DigitalNC.org website. These digitized newspapers date back to 1935, when UNC Asheville was called Biltmore College and the student paper was The Highlander. 


April 1935 issue of The Highlander,
the student paper of Biltmore College

For the last three decades, UNC Asheville students have written, edited, published, and read The Blue Banner, UNC Asheville's student paper since 1984. Before it was called The Blue Banner, the student newspaper had no fewer than five different titles.  Many of these student newspapers (sporting all their various titles)  are available through the DigitalNC.org website, including:

You'll note that some years appear to be missing from the above list. Not all papers have been digitized for DigitalNC yet. This is an ongoing project and more will be completed over the course of the next year or so. The dates listed above indicate what has been digitized to date.

In addition to the student newspapers mentioned above, DigitalNC.org also includes a few other UNC Asheville publications, including The Bulldog Barker (2002-2005), an entertainment guide published by the Office of Student Life,  as well as  The Rag and Bone Shop (1979-1981), an art and literary magazine.  There is also one issue of the UNC-A Free Press, an "underground" newspaper from 1974 published by students.

DigitalNC also digitized UNC Asheville's yearbooks. You can view them via this link. 

This digitization project is a collaborative project between UNC Asheville's Archives and Special Collections and the Digital Heritage Center at UNC Chapel Hill. The original copies of all these publications are housed in the Archives in Ramsey Library.


Tuesday, July 8, 2014

Celebrating the work of our Special Collections Interns!

During the Spring Semester Special Collections was abuzz with the work of three gifted interns from the UNC Asheville History Department. Tasmin Milner and Chase Newsom collaborated to reprocess and create a new finding aid for the Irwin Monk Papers, while Joshua Dacey reprocessed and created a new finding aid for the Frank Coxe Papers. Chase Newsom also created a new finding aid for the Tench Coxe Collection.  Their work with these collections adds more descriptive detail and brings the collections' content into new focus, providing better information for researchers wishing to use these collections.

The Irwin Monk Papers include documents, correspondence, military records, legal documents, and other materials that were donated by the family of Irwin Monk. Monk was an Asheville native, a friend of Thomas Wolfe (who showed up in a cameo role in Look Homeward Angel), an attorney, and a veteran of World War I. He was an active member of the American Legion and Buncombe County Bar Association. The Monk  collection includes materials from his service in the Signal Corps in WWI, including US Army maps that show trench positions.

Frank Coxe (1839-1903) was an executive with the Western North Carolina railroad. He moved to Asheville in 1881, where he purchased land and built the Battery Park Hotel. Between his interests in the WNC Railroad and his development of the Battery Park, Coxe was a major force in the early development of tourism in Asheville. The Frank Coxe Papers include early documents about the Coxe family, correspondence and business records related to the construction and management of the Battery Park Hotel, scrapbooks and account books, photographs, and other materials.


The interns also created exhibits for the cases outside of Special Collections, located on the top floor of Ramsey Library. Tasmin Milner and Chase Newsom created an exhibit based on materials from the Irwin Monk Collection, while Joshua Dacey applied his personal interest in stringed instruments by researching and creating an exhibit based on the banjo and dulcimer making brothers, Wade & Wayne Martin. The exhibits will be up through mid-August. Drop by Special Collections and take a look at the fine work done by our interns!

Irwin Monk exhibit (left) and Martin brothers instrument exhibit (right)

Information about the Marin Family musical instrument collection.
Handmade banjo and dulcimers in the exhibit.
Information about the Irwin Monk Papers exhibit.

World War I materials on display from the Irwin Monk Papers.