Friday, June 12, 2015

Digital Library on American Slavery

Richard Cox did a very interesting session on this resource, and I would urge all to take a look.  It's one of our most heavily used resources, around 300,000 hits per year, mostly by users outside of the University.  https://library.uncg.edu/slavery/  is the main website and the largest portion is the Race and Slavery Petitions Project - used heavily by African American (and other) genealogists and researchers on the history of slavery.  The online source is an index but we also have microfilm of the actual handwritten petitions (the title is Race, Slavery and Free Blacks)  - there's a guide in the Ref collection at E441 .R280 and the Film numbers are 5294 and 4939.  We are one of the few libraries in the country that owns the entire set - most locations have the records only for their own states.    It's a tricky set to use because you need to use the PAR number which is explained in depth in the print volumes,   Essentially, you must have the state and the year from the online index to find them easily. We do appear to have online access to these through Proquest's History Vault but for some reason it's not on the Database list.  

1 comment:

KathrynC said...

I agree -- it was a very interesting session and an important resource.