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Middle Tennessee History Project Analysis

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Project: The Middle Tennessee History Coalition (MTHC), in collaboration with the Tennessee State Library and Archives the North Carolina State Library, and the University of North Carolina, proposes a project that will digitize the Colonial and State Records of North Carolina. This is a collection of approximately 9,400 documents that cover a period from European settlement to the founding of the United States and beyond. All twenty-six volumes will be digitized. The colonial records of North Carolina were originally compiled before 1886 by William Saunders, and covered the period between early settlement of the colony and 1776. Saunders was a newspaper editor, lawyer, and ultimately the Secretary of State for North Carolina. Saunders …show more content…

The core philosophy of the MTHC is that the true value of preserving historical records is only realized when they are accessible to everyone. The MTHC has endeavored to accomplish this through heritage interpretation programs, in-school history programs, funding historical preservation, and with the completion of this project, funding the digital preservation of historical records. The history of North Carolina is the history of Tennessee. Prior to statehood, the area that is now Tennessee was part of the colony and eventually the State of North Carolina. Founded in 1663 under a royal charter granted by King Charles II, the colony extended west to the Pacific and included all lands between the colony of Virginia and Florida. What we now know as Tennessee was ceded to the newly created government of the United States by North Carolina to satisfy war debts and tax burdens owed to the new Federal government and became known as the Southwest Territory. Many prominent figures in the colonial and early state governments of North Carolina went on to play a significant role in settling and developing what is not Tennessee. The first governor of the Southwest Territory was William Blount. Blount was a member of the North Carolina delegation to the …show more content…

Metadata will include access management, preservation, administrative, descriptive, technical and structural data. Much of the metadata will have to be created. The original volumes had no table of contents, index, or other description of the records. Additionally, volumes were arranged chronologically with no attention paid to document type, source, or content. In addition to author, title, publisher, and date, descriptive metadata will be expanded include keywords regarding subjects, individuals, locations, or events referenced in the document, as well as any related documents. This will be a time consuming and costly effort, but it required to maximize the value of the online data to researchers, students, teachers, etc. An index for all volumes was completed after the fact in 1909 and that index will be incorporated into a referential database behind the web page front end, rather than in the metadata itself. A complete list of metadata elements are provided in Appendix

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