The following is a report submitted for the annual meeting (July 2020) of the Association for Librarians and Archivists at Baptist Institutions (ALABI).

The North Carolina Baptist Historical Collection had another productive year for 2019. Among its activities were the following:

Access:

Wake Forest recently became a contributing institution to the American Theological Library Association (ATLA) Digital Library. ATLA provides a hub that promotes visibility and access to digital collections related to religion and theology. The first collection that we are contributing to ATLA are the North Carolina Baptist Church Records.

Grants:

Throughout 2019, SCA focused on the creation of metadata for our CLIR-funded Recordings at Risk Grant which provided support for digitizing open-reel and cassette audiotapes for the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina. A total of 1,339 items have been digitized by George Blood LP (Philadelphia) and ingested into WakeSpace (WF’s institutional repository). SCA has created 191 (another 100 in process) in-depth descriptions and 1,192 preliminary descriptions are also available for the online materials. These recordings document the American evangelical movement and contain presentations by prominent Southern Baptist pastors and church representatives at evangelical conferences and annual meetings of the Convention.

Digitizing Baptist files:

The Baptist Church and Association files continue to be digitized and 25,041 pages were scanned in 2019. 73 boxes have been completed thus far, out of 184 total.

Processing, Reference, and Outreach:

During 2019, we accessioned 7 accretions (nearly 20 linear ft.) for Baptist collections and received numerous publications for addition to our collection of monographs and serials. We responded to 250 requests and visitors for our Baptist collections.

Submitted February 2020