Digital Collections Collaborations

The Records Management Division is a partner institution with the Lowcountry Digital Library (LCDL). LCDL is a digital repository hosted by the College of Charleston that “produces digital collections and projects that support research about the Lowcountry region of South Carolina and historically interconnected sites in the Atlantic World.” The partnership enables the Records Management Division to digitize and make its archival municipal holdings accessible to an audience of students, researchers, and members of the public around the world. LCDL records are harvested into the South Carolina Digital Public Library and the Digital Public Library of America and are also indexed by Google and all other major search engines. Digitization also means that researchers can interact with scanned documents in a way that they cannot with the physical records. Digitization enables us to provide enhanced security and preservation measures for our physical records.

A screenshot of the City of Charleston Records Management Division's institutional page on LCDL.

LCDL participation is also exciting in that it opens up partnerships with other Lowcountry institutions. We uploaded our first collection in 2011through a partnership with the Charleston Library Society. The Charleston Library Society has the only extant copy of the1931 Report of the City Planning and Zoning Commission Upon a Program for the Development of a City Plan with Specific Studies of Certain Features Thereof. The City Records Management Division is in possession of the oversized zone maps that are referenced in the report. Prepared by zoning consultant firm of Morris Knowles, Inc., the report and accompanying maps paved the way for the City of Charleston 1931 zoning ordinance, the first municipal ordinance with a defined historic district. The ordinance established the Old and Historic District, which was the first historic district protected by local legislation in the United States. Learn more and view the maps and report on our LCDL institutional page.

 Digitized images from the LCDL City of Charleston Records Management Collection.

Our partnership with LCDL has also led to a second collaboration with the College of Charleston. To date, we have hosted two College of Charleston academic interns who have moved between the Records Management Division and LCDL. Here with the City, the students have learned about municipal records management, archival processing, and the digitization of City of Charleston records. Students are assigned a semester project and, from there, receive training and support from Leah Worthington, Digital Projects Librarian and Associate Director of LCDL. The students move between Records Management and LCDL for the duration of the semester.

This spring we have hosted Ashlyn Pause, a senior at the College of Charleston. She digitized a newly rediscovered manuscript index of the City Year Books before moving onto a much more nuanced project digitizing archival Board of Architectural Review (BAR) images that were submitted as part of the application process. Many of the records were originally microfilmed, which is best for preserving the historical data on printed documents but is not the best means of preserving photographs. Digitization enables us to rectify some of the poor-quality microfilm images and share these images with a wide audience. Ashlyn’s work on both projects required archival processing, research, scanning, and assigning metadata.

See Ashlyn’s blog post for her experience digitizing the Year Book index and check back later for her post on the BAR project.