The Growing Digital Civil War Archive at the University of Mississippi

Abstract

In 2011, the University of Mississippi’s Archives and Special Collections began an ongoing project to digitize a portion of materials related to the Civil War. This started as a means of participating in the Association of Southeastern Research Libraries’ (ASERL’s) collaborative digitization project, Civil War in the American South, which was established to celebrate the sesquicentennial of the American Civil War. ASERL’s project provides a single access point for Civil War materials from multiple repositories, and currently includes over 10,000 items from 30 libraries. In addition to providing greater access to the University’s materials via the ASERL’s portal, the creation of the University of Mississippi’s Digital Civil War Archive provides a space to present various materials from multiple collections that are all related to the subject of the American Civil War. This provides an opportunity for greater discoverability and scholarship both near to and far from the library. In conjunction with the Civil War subject guide, which links to the Digital Civil War Archive, the library provides rich, cross-referencing tools for those interested in Mississippi and the Civil War. In addition to providing a brief history of UM’s Civil War Digital Collection, this paper will document the process of identification, selection, and project management of materials to be added in 2014 to the Digital Civil War Archive, completed by Jennifer Ford (Head, Archives and Special Collection at University of Mississippi) and Susan Ivey (Digital Initiatives Librarian, University of Mississippi and author of this paper) in December 2013.