The following announcement was written by the State Archives of North Carolina:

The State Archives of North Carolina is excited to announce a new way to browse our digital collections – through a tool called CollectionBuilder. You can view our pilot project, a digital collection titled She Changed the World: North Carolina Women Breaking Barriers, by following this link: https://she-changed-world.cb.ncpedia.org/  

CollectionBuilder is exciting because it allows us to take items that were already digitized and living in the North Carolina Digital Collections (NCDC) and present them to you in new ways. Our She Changed the World pilot project pulls from various digital collections and includes state publications, photographs, letters, oral histories, posters, and more all relating to the subject of women’s history in North Carolina. Think of it almost like a digital exhibit, using a curated selection of records from our collections to highlight a specific topic. In this case, our topic is NC women’s history in support of the DNCR initiative She Changed the World. 

An example of an item page in our She Changed the World collection pilot project using CollectionBuilder. 

While NCDC is great simply because of the sheer amount of material it contains (over 90,000 items!), we know it can also be overwhelming to navigate when you are searching for a specific subject across our many digital collections. It is our hope that we can create more CollectionBuilder exhibits about a variety of topics to help you discover relevant materials quickly and easily. Within the site itself, you can browse items randomly or search through them by subject, location, or timeframe. Just use the black bar at the top of the page to choose a different way to browse.  

Use the black bar at the top of the page to choose different ways to browse items – in this case, we are looking at a word cloud of subject terms. 

This project was completed in collaboration by the State Archives of North Carolina and the State Library of North Carolina. The CollectionBuilder platform was developed by faculty librarians at the University of Idaho Library, and we couldn’t have gotten our project up and running without their help. If you have any feedback or questions about this collection or the platform, please drop us a line at digital.info@ncdcr.gov.