This annual report was submitted to the Association of Librarians and Archivists at Baptist Institutions (ALABI).

The North Carolina Baptist Historical Collection had another productive year for 2022. Among its activities were the following:

Digitizing Baptist files: The Baptist Church Association files continue to be digitized and 5,318 pages were scanned. 148 boxes have been completed, out of 193 boxes total. We are also in the process of re-digitizing the Biblical Recorder due to the increasing costs of the third-party proprietary platform which currently hosts the issues. A total of 9,209 pages were scanned in 2022. Special thanks are due to our Digital Collections Librarian, Melde Rutledge, and our SCA student assistants for completing this work.

In addition, WFU worked with Backstage to digitize 2 microfilm reels for the Wake Forest Baptist Church (Wake Forest, NC), which includes the Church Minutes, Vol. 1-5 1835-1985. We also continued digitizing selected materials from the collection of Reverend Harold McKinnish, who served as pastor or interim pastor at 10 different Baptist churches in western North and South Carolina. This collection includes sermons, folk music, and video recordings of his last sermon and funeral service. His daughter, Linda McKinnish Bridges, is currently working on his biography.

Access: While no metadata records were created for the CLIR-funded Recordings at Risk Grant which provided support for digitizing open-reel and cassette audiotapes for the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina, plans were made for employing a PT metadata technician to create metadata in 2023. The 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. Nearly 700 recordings remain needing metadata (out of app. 1,500).

The Director witnessed the closing of the Wake Forest Baptist Church (Wake Forest University/Winston-Salem) and created a popup exhibit for a Friday reception and a Saturday Celebration of Life in November 2022. We also digitized some selected materials, beginning with the church minutes in 1956 through 1991, and will digitize additional materials in 2023.

Processing, Reference, and Outreach: During 2022, we accessioned 9 accretions (nearly 5 linear ft.) for Baptist collections and received numerous publications for addition to our collection of monographs and serials.

We coordinated and hosted an online program featuring researcher and scholar Shaun Price who spoke about his experiences, Our Story of Faith: The Challenge and Joy of Writing the History of Wake Forest Baptist Church (Wake Forest, NC).

We responded to 196 research questions/visitors for our Baptist collections. A special thank you to Public Services Archivist Rebecca Petersen May and Archives Assistant Finley Turner for handling many of these requests.

Tanya Zanish-Belcher, Director-Special Collections & Archives, Wake Forest University