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Commemorative history of the First African Baptist Church of Goldsboro– one of the items contributed by ZSR Special Collections & Archives to the Religion in NC digital collection.

2015 saw the completion of the Religion in North Carolina digital collection. This IMLS grant funded project, begun in 2012, was spearheaded by Duke Divinity School Library, partnering with libraries at UNC-Chapel Hill and Wake Forest University.

The final project provides free online access to over 6000 print volumes produced by religious organizations in North Carolina. Items range from single-page pamphlets to multi-volume histories. Z. Smith Reynolds Library’s Special Collections and Archives contributed 1645 volumes to the digitization project. Since the collection went live, ZSR’s materials have had nearly 360,000 views. The collection as a whole has over a million uses.

In its final year, the Religion in North Carolina project offered mini-grants to educators and researchers in the state for projects that made use of the digitized collections. One of these mini-grants went to Wake Forest University School of Divinity professor Jill Crainshaw for her project “From Living Water to Running Water: A History of Baptistery Art and Craft in North Carolina”.