BDC Docent Projects, 2024 : National Volunteer Week

Because it's National Volunteer Week - and the BDC would be considerably diminished without the steadfastness and dedication of our Beloved BDC docents - , I decided to tell you a bit about the various projects the BDC's Beloved Docent have at present. Each docent helps the BDC accomplish its mission of caring for and sharing materials about local history.  

Joe Noll used to work for Beaufort County's GIS department and brought digitization skills with him.  Most recently, he has been working on digitizing the Josie Childs Slide Collection of images related to  Mather School. This collection will be added to the BCL's contributions to the Lowcountry Digital Library when the work is done.

Kathy Mitchell, another former BCL librarian, continues to find dead people in the newspaper microfilm to index. And she can really tell when the county’s population increases because the number of dead cited in the newspapers has really gone up year-over-year. We have more than 31,000 individuals listed in the Online Obituary Index now, thanks to Kathy and her predecessor indexers since the early 1990s.

When Laura Lewis finished working on the digitization of the Wales Journal, I assigned her to vertical file integration project. You see, we inherited vertical files from both the Hilton Head and Beaufort Branches and have been merging those materials and the BDC's own vertical file array into one sequence. Laura's attention to detail has been invaluable. She’s been great at identifying duplicates, keeping the best copy, photocopying and citing newspaper clippings, alerting me to "special cases" which helps me decide if and when to separate contents into existing BDC files or create new ones, doing research as needed, etc. Valerie of the Technical Services department who’s also working on this project – because it’s a BIG project of about 5 or so years now – is delighted to have Laura laboring on the labor intensive project with her. Valerie’s specialty is government related files and the library catalog “side” of the integration project. 

Peggy Scott has returned to a project we stopped about a decade ago to concentrate on the Behan land-genealogy Papers. The docent’s part of the Behan is done so now she is back to processing, labeling, refoldering and refiling contents of some of the 100K envelopes of film negatives and film prints to be found in the Lucille Hasell Culp Collection. Back in the day she and Marlyn and Linda Schumacher did enough of this processing work to create an index with more than 5000 personal names in it. There’s likely another 5000 or more human and non-human subjects to go. This index is available only on staff computers in the Research Room. 

A new volunteer, Alison Cody, has just come aboard to create an index of David Lauderdale’s local history column articles in the Island Packet and later the Beaufort Gazette. Alison's index will ultimately be available in our Research Room as is index that Laura Lewis made of the 1766 Gerhard Spieler articles in the Beaufort Gazette. Jalen, the BDC's assistant, just updated the index to Dennis Adams' newspaper "Answer Man" columns.  

Another new volunteer, Clinton Hallman, is expected to soon begin transcribing the Coroner's Inquest Records related to the Hurricane of 1893. Those can be quite emotionally draining since that tropical event killed many and the testimony can be heartbreaking.  [You can hear me read some of those testimonies in the recorded "Tide of Death" video posted on the Library' YouTube Channel.]