Staff from the Library of Virginia (LVA), including Laura Drake Davis of the CW150 Legacy Project — Western Region, Senior Finding Aids Archivist Trenton Hizer, and myself, recently compiled and manned a display for the biennial meeting of the Society of Civil War Historians, held in Richmond. The Society is co-sponsored by Florida Atlantic University and Penn State University’s Richards Civil War Era Center.
Virginia Sesquicentennial of the American Civil War Commission logo.
The conference was a good opportunity to share the scope of our collections with the public. LVA’s Photographic and Digital Imaging Department Manager Mark Fagerburg and his staff created beautiful dry mount boards with images of fifteen manuscripts from the Library’s Local, Private, and State Records collections, including a sketchbook kept by Benjamin Lewis Blackford (Acc. 22177c), Franklin County Reports of Indigent Soldiers’ Families (Barcodes 1145465, 1145468), and a letter of the Black Band of New York to Governor Henry A. Wise (Acc. 36710).
Over the course of the three-day conference, we spoke to a number of participants to drum up interest in the Library and the CW 150 Legacy Project. The project, a joint venture of the Library of Virginia and the Virginia Sesquicentennial of the American Civil War Commission, is an effort to scour the state to locate and scan privately-held manuscript items relating to the Civil War, for eventual availability online.
LVA’s display at the conference included some digital scans gathered in Danville and Winchester, Virginia, during the pilot phase of the CW 150 Legacy Project, from late 2008 to 2009. For more information about this endeavor, click here, and keep checking this blog. We plan to post a more detailed explanation of the project and updates on its progress as it gets underway in the next few months!
-Renee Savits, CW 150 Legacy Project — Eastern Region
What a great idea to try to find privately-held manuscripts to make them available online!