Main Street, Carolina: Uncovering and Reclaiming the History of Downtown

FAIN: HD-50809-09

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Chapel Hill, NC 27599-1350)
Natalia N. Smith (Project Director: April 2009 to February 2012)

Development of an open-source framework for accessing the UNC Library's collection of original Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps, indexed to a wide range of primary source material.

Main Street, Carolina is a web-based digital history resource that would allow local libraries, schools, museums, preservation and local history societies, and other community organizations across the state to preserve, document, interpret, and share the history of the places that have given each town its character and identity over the past century. This project builds on our nationally recognized digital humanities project, Going to the Show, which has developed cutting-edge techniques for representing local cultural and social history through the use of the North Carolina Collection's unparalleled archive of local maps, photographs, and historic newspapers. Main Street, Carolina will share the benefits of this historical research and technological expertise with local organizations throughout the state by providing them with a flexible, user-friendly digital platform on which they can add a wide variety of "local" data.

Associated Products

Main Street, Carolina (Web Resource)
Title: Main Street, Carolina
Author: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Abstract: Main Street, Carolina is designed to encourage and facilitate the production of digital projects about the history of towns and cities in North Carolina. We work in collaboration with local organizations around the state to originate, plan, and develop online projects that engage local audiences around the history of their communities through the "location" of multimedia content on historical maps. A unique feature of Main Street, Carolina is its system for displaying and manipulating more than 1000 large-scale, color, fire insurance maps of 45 towns and cities in North Carolina published between 1885 and 1923. Projects can also use more than 300 other georeferenced historical maps of North Carolina drawn from North Carolina Maps. As its name suggests, Main Street, Carolina recovers and represents the turn-of-the-century history of "downtowns" in North Carolina in an especially powerful way, enabling a wide range of users to discover previously invisible connections among people, events, stories, images, and places. It also encourages them to connect that history with the lived experience and built environments of their communities today.
Year: 2011
Primary URL: http://mainstreet.lib.unc.edu/
Primary URL Description: The Web site includes several collaborative projects that have been created to field test the Main Street Carolina (MSC) software and to demonstrate the many facets of the MSC platform. These were all designed to be demonstration projects responding to particular needs of the client organizations while testing the capacities and limitations of MSC for interpreting, representing, and sharing the history of urban spaces in North Carolina.

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