Some of What We Accomplished in March

The Beaufort District Collection (BDC) had a busy March with materials processing, community engagement activities and a BDC@ Bluffton Branch archaeology program, co-sponsored with the Beaufort Chapter, Archaeological Society of South Carolina.

Ashley continues to work on the Arnsberger Postcard Collection, preparing it for submission to the Lowcountry Digital Library this week. It's been an intensive process making high resolution scans of more than 200 postcards, capturing metadata, creating tags and subject headings. We hope that you enjoy the end results beginning National Postcard Week in May. 

Among the goals we set for this unit during 2016 was to interact more often with more segments of our community. Thus, the BDC continues to enter into collaborations with community groups.

•  The BDC represented the Library system on the Beaufort History Museum’s Living History Civil War Encampment weekend planning committee and at the event on Saturday.  Staff talked with 160 people and handed out 100 brochures about Civil War materials and Library services. 

• We highlighted the family history resources of the BDC for 10 members of the Charleston Genealogy Society on March 16, first during a behind-the-scenes tour and for some, during a family history research session.

• Senior staff attended the private “Virtue, Liberty, Science: A Legacy of Education in Beaufort County: History and Reflections on the Occasion of the Investiture of Dr. Al M. Panu” lecture and reception the evening of March 16. 

• On March 23, 30 Landmark Conference attendees got to enjoy a broad subset of our treasures in a special behind-the-scenes tour. Staff was pleased to be invited to the Landmark Conference banquet on March 24 during which they heard Dr. Brent Morris’s presentation on historical interpretations of Reconstruction through the past century and to interact with other stewards of cultural heritage collections.

Such community engagement activities allow BDC staff to interact with other professionals, customers, and the public, to assess the Library’s perception in the community, solicit input, and provide fertile ground for new ideas for service delivery to form. 

As you may remember from previous posts, the BDC is the only Beaufort County Library public service unit that has to provide services and programs at other Library unit locations. We have to provide at least one program per year per location - though at some of the locations we do more (depending on meeting room availability, speaker preferences, and turn-out at previous programs and trainings at a particular location).

On March 22, LAMAR Institute archaeologists, Dan and Rita Elliott, screened a documentary film and gave the Battle of Purysburg Final Report at Bluffton Branch to 26 interested people. This well-attended program was co-sponsored by the Beaufort Chapter, Archaeological Society of South Carolina.We hope to return to Bluffton Branch with a quite different local history program over the summer.