NGS Conference in the States, Raleigh, NC. May 13, 2009.

Session W153, "The Digital CSR", Presenter: Jason Tomberlin.

University of North Carolina has a project digitizing and indexing a 30 volume set titled Colonial and State Records. These volumes were an effort by State historians to preserve original records and documents from the period covering roughly 1776 - 1790. These volumes were compiled over a period from 1886 - 1914. The books are becoming hard to find and are starting to deteriorate, so UNC decided to preserve them online.

The interesting thing about this set is that it even though it is a numbered series, it does not consistently flow in time. Some volumes cover sequential document sets while others cover different collections. The challenge for UNC was to develop a system to digitize and index while preserving the authors' intent and providing better search capabilities. They have also devised a mechanism to identify errors in the original volumes.

Vols 1-10: Colonial Records of NC, roughly by time. Volumes 1-6 are documents while the remainder are records.

Vols 23-25: Law Volumes. 1660 - 1790. Contains published statutes from around the State.

Vol 26: 1790 Federal Census for NC

Vols 27-30: Master index to most of the series, but only indexes volumes 1-25. Volumes 23-26 have their own index within Volume 25. Thus, there are redundant indexes created by different editors at different times.

Volume 26 has its own index (mostly names)

Colonial and State Records