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"The North Carolina Experience," presents a wide variety of materials relating to the diverse social, economic, religious, and political history of North Carolina. Representative histories, personal narratives, descriptive accounts, institutional reports, fiction, and other published writings have been selected to provide users with greater insight into the experiences of North Carolinians, both as individuals and as a community. This collection also includes a sampling of oral history interviews and workplace songs, both as audio files and text transcriptions, which offer users a chance to hear North Carolinians tell their own story. In addition, researchers can browse subjects for the over three thousand illustrations and photographs found in the digitized publications. These materials range from travel narratives by Europeans seeing North Carolina and its native people for the first time to materials documenting government efforts to improve public health in the 1930s and 1940s, and a multitude of topics in between.
"The North Carolina Experience," collection was funded by major grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, entitled "North Carolina in Black and White." This grant permitted digitization of 30,000 pages of text, twenty oral history interviews, and six workplace songs. Under the terms of this grant, Docsouth has emphasized the social and cultural history of North Carolina, with a special effort made to document the different historical experiences of black and white Tar Heels.
In 2002, the State Library of North Carolina awarded the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill a Library Services and Technology grant to create the collection, "North Carolinians and the Great War: The Impact of World War I on the Tar Heel State." This grant funded digitization of five hundred pages of manuscript letters and diary entries, 1,500 pages from published texts, and digital images of one hundred photographic images, twenty World War I artifacts, and one hundred propaganda posters. These materials, which are listed separately as a collection and within the North Carolina Experience collection, provide a wealth a visual, personal, and institutional information about North Carolina during World War I.
The original materials digitized in this collection come primarily from the North Carolina Collection and the Manuscripts Department of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Library. Occasionally, publications and materials have been borrowed from other collections and institutions.
The selection of texts for the IMLS-funded grant has been guided by scholarly advisors Harry L. Watson, Professor of History, and James L. Leloudis, Associate Professor of History, both at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Michael Sistrom, a graduate student in history at UNC-Chapel Hill, served as History Research Assistant for the grant. He researched and wrote the subject introductions and contents notes (coming soon) for most of the materials digitized under the IMLS grant and advised on the selection of texts to be digitized. He also helped select published materials for digitization under the LSTA grant.