Special Collections & Archives (SCA) is well known for its North Carolina Baptist Historical Collection which contains materials on Southern, Missionary, Primitive, African-American, Union, and Alliance of Baptist churches. The collections include over 16,000 books, periodicals, association annuals and other printed materials, church records, association minutes, church vertical files, and more than 12,000 biographical folders containing information on and photographs of Baptist pastors and Wake Forest alumni.

SCA is in the process of creating, with the assistance of ZSR’s Technology Team, a Baptist Portal which will give researchers easier access to our many Baptist resources. There will be links to the Biblical Recorder, Digitized Church Records (funded by LSTA (Library Services and Technology Act Grant) from the State Library of North Carolina), Finding Aids, in addition to Frequently Asked Questions, News, Links to Other Baptist Repositories, and how to contact us with reference questions.

Some recent examples of the collections to be made available through the Portal include:

• The North Carolina Digital Heritage Center completed the digitizing of 55 issues
  of Zion’s Landmarks, a Baptist newspaper published in Wilson, North Carolina, now available online. The issues, “devoted to the defense of the Primitive Baptists,” date from 1869 to 1877.
• In November 2017, Special Collections & Archives (ZSR Library, Wake Forest University) was notified it was one of 16 recipients of a Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) Recordings at Risk Grant. CLIR provided $50,000 for “Documenting the Evangelical Movement in the United States: Digitizing Baptist State Convention of North Carolina Open-Reel Audiotapes, 1957-1980.” George Blood LP (Philadelphia) has been reformatting and digitizing approximately 1,500 at-risk and rare open-reel and cassette audio recordings for SCA. We hope to make these available to researchers in the coming year.
• Finally, ZSR’s Digital Scholarship is digitizing our Baptist Biographical Files and Association Files (ongoing) in-house.