North Carolina Echo : Exploring Cultural Heritage Online

About NC ECHO

NC ECHO enables users to search across thousands of digitized and born-digital historic materials including a wide variety of books, photographs, maps, family histories, state documents, newspapers, and much more from cultural heritage institutions around North Carolina. The collections available through NC ECHO include a diverse array of materials by and about the people, places, and history of North Carolina. All of the collections available through the NC ECHO Search are freely available online to all users, regardless of their location or affiliation.

The NC ECHO Search was developed by staff members at NC LIVE, the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center, and the State Library of North Carolina. It is hosted and maintained by NC LIVE.

Institutions Represented in the NC ECHO Search

The NC ECHO Search currently includes records from selected collections at the following institutions:

• East Carolina University
• Johnson C. Smith University
• New Hanover County Public Library
• North Carolina Digital Collections, Department of Cultural Resources
• North Carolina Digital Heritage Center
• University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• The University of North Carolina at Greensboro
• Wake Forest University
• Western Carolina University

Please note that not all of the descriptive information for the materials represented in NC ECHO can be searched through this site. Full text of digitized newspapers and other publications is not searchable in NC ECHO, but can be searched through each digital collection's home page.

If you manage a digital collection containing materials related to North Carolina history and culture and would like to participate in the NC ECHO Search, or if you would like to suggest a collection to include, please contact the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center at digitalnc@unc.edu or (919) 962-4836.

Understanding the New NC ECHO

• Institutional Directory →
  North Carolina Office of Archives and History

• Grant Programs →
  State Library of North Carolina

• Digitization and Metadata Guidelines →
  North Carolina Digital Heritage Center

• Digital Preservation →
  State Library of North Carolina

• Preservation and Disaster Planning →
  North Carolina Connecting to Collections

Advanced Search Tips

Exact Phrases

To search North Carolina Digital Content by exact phrase, surround the phrase in quotation marks in the keyword search field, e.g.:

"Charlotte Speedway"

Boolean Search Syntax

The NC ECHO Search supports boolean searches, with a specific syntax. To search for items that contain both phrases "Family Records" and "marriage", enter the following into the search box:

"Family Records" AND "marriage"

To search for items that contain either "Wake County" or "Mecklenburg County", enter the following:

"Wake County" OR "Mecklenburg County"

Please note that "AND" and "OR" must be uppercase for the operator to function, and keywords to be searched must be surrounded by quotation marks.

More Search Options

There are many more options for searching the digital collections represented in NC ECHO on each collection's homepage. Most of these collections offer advanced search functions including searching within specific fields and full text searches.

Help

For help using the NC ECHO Search, please email help@ncecho.org.

NC ECHO History

NC ECHO grew out of the strategic planning activities of the North Carolina State Library Commission which, in 1999, adopted and published a roadmap to the future entitled, "Building Libraries: A Plan for Library Cooperation." An important element in that plan was the Commission's desire to use emerging Internet technology to increase public access to "specialized resources" about North Carolina's history and culture held in the state's libraries, archives, museums and historic sites.

To make this vision a reality, the Commission created the Access to Special Collections Working Group (ASCWG), later known as the NC ECHO Advisory Committee. The State Library of North Carolina secured support for ASCWG’s activities with a grant from federal Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) funding provided through the Institute of Museum and Library Services. ASCWG members included librarians, archivists, educators, and museum professionals from public and private institutions throughout the state.

2000

In March 2000, seeking greater input from their colleagues, ASCWG convened a conference of North Carolina cultural heritage caretakers and stakeholders who met for two days in High Point, N.C. Following a review of other statewide initiatives, this group of approximately 100 persons directed ASCWG to create a web portal to organize and present the digital resources already created by North Carolina's cultural institutions. This "High Point Group" also asked ASCWG to gather information about North Carolina's cultural heritage community via a statewide survey and to create a long-term vision and plan for the project. Thus the NC ECHO (North Carolina Exploring Cultural Heritage Online) Project was born.

2001

In April 2001, the High Point Group reconvened to review the first survey results, hear from representatives of the state's major digitization programs, and unveil the NC ECHO web portal. That same spring, the State Library hired the first NC ECHO staff members who began the creation of a comprehensive online list of all of North Carolina's cultural heritage institutions—libraries, museums, archives, and historic sites—in a directory that would eventually grow to include more than 950 institutions. The Project Archivist and Project Librarian traveled to visit each of the identified institutions. On these survey site visits, staff met with cultural heritage caretakers, discussed institutions' accomplishments and challenges, viewed collections, took photographs, and administered a formal needs assessment survey (the Survey of North Carolina Cultural Repositories). After collating survey results, NC ECHO staff returned to each region they had surveyed and conducted a "summary meeting" bringing together all the cultural heritage caretakers from the region's institutions. These meetings served as an opportunity for caretakers to learn more about NC ECHO and its programs, but more importantly to learn more about each other and to discover ways they could work together. Facilitating collaboration and community building was a foundation stone for NC ECHO.

2005

In 2005, NC ECHO completed its initial survey of institutions in all 100 counties. Staff had identified over 950 cultural heritage institutions in the state and has obtained survey responses from 761 of them. Data from the survey responses was compiled into a Final Report that addressed cultural institutions' collection scope and size, access, researchers and visitors, facilities and equipment, preservation concerns, staff and volunteers, financial support, needs and priorities, and digitization initiatives. In 2010, NC ECHO published North Carolina's Cultural Resources: A Survey and Report, a summary of the survey data and a glimpse into the vast size and complexity of North Carolina's cultural heritage collections and community.

Using information gathered in the survey regarding institutions' needs, NC ECHO gave cultural heritage institutions the tools necessary to increase access to their collections in an online environment. The project developed several workshops, including a week-long Digitization Institute, that provided hands-on instruction in digitization strategies to staff and volunteers of NC ECHO partner institutions. The Project has developed Guidelines for Digitization which described best practice standards for creating digital content.

Metadata

NC ECHO also assisted institutions in the creation of quality metadata. In 2004 the Project added a new position, Metadata Coordinator, to the staff roster. The Metadata Coordinator offered workshops on topics such as Encoded Archival Description (EAD), provided on-site consultations with institutions working on digitization, created working groups on metadata-related topics such as Dublin Core, EAD and Preservation Metadata for Digital Objects (PMDO), wrote guidelines for implementation of metadata standards, and developed an Encoded Archival Context (EAC) database of North Carolina Biographical and Historical Information Online (NCBHIO).

Digitization Grants

Knowledge and tools are often not enough to complete a successful digitization project. To assist institutions with funding for digitization projects, NC ECHO developed a digitization grant program that allowed libraries and partnering institutions to seek LSTA funding for the creation of digital collections. The grant program was inaugurated in 2001/2002 with a series of Demonstration Grants. Over the following decade, these grants helped to build and expand digital library programs across the state and resulted in a number of successful and popular projects. Digitization grants are still offered through the State Library of North Carolina.

Partners

The State Library of North Carolina had several key partner organizations during the course of the NC ECHO Project, including Duke University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the North Carolina State Archives. Many other organizations also contributed substantial staff time and support to the work of the Project, including Appalachian State University, East Carolina University, the University of North Carolina at Asheville, the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Johnson C. Smith University, Davidson College, the Scotland County Memorial Library, North Carolina Historic Sites, the Mint Museums, the Onslow County Museum, the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, the North Carolina Center for the Advancement of Teaching, and LEARN NC.

Staff

The NC ECHO Project's many talented staff members were critical to the success of the Project. In chronological order by the position they have held, they are: