A division of GALILEO, Georgia’s virtual library, and housed at The University of Georgia Libraries, the Digital Library of Georgia (DLG) is the state’s cultural heritage digitization initiative. Active since 1996, DLG partners with libraries, archives, and museums to facilitate online access to resources about Georgia’s history, culture, and life. In addition to its Georgia portal, the DLG also hosts the IMLS-funded Civil Rights Digital Library and ASERL’s Civil War in the American South. In 2013, DLG became one of the first six service hubs for the Digital Public Library of America, and we host the state’s newspaper microfilming project, the Georgia Newspaper Project. We have no physical collections, only virtual ones.
DLG’s mission is two-fold: provide seamless, free online access to historical resources about the state and provide leadership and support in digitization for Georgia’s cultural heritage organizations. DLG hosts four portals: our Georgia portal (https://dlg.usg.edu), a historic newspaper portal, (https://gahistoricnewspapers.galileo.usg.edu), the Civil Rights Digital Library (https://crdl.usg.edu), and the ASERL-based Civil War portal, Civil War in the American South. Through these four portals, we provide access to 636,000 digital objects from over 450 holding institutions nation-wide and over 1.1 million pages of digitized historic newspapers. In 2017, DLG joined the Library of Congress and National Endowment for the Humanities’ National Digital Newspaper Program.
We provide the state’s memory institutions a number of services for free or cost recovery fees. Free services include best practice guides and toolkits, consulting, grant proposal development assistance, hosting of access or master files, metadata funneling to DPLA, metadata hosting, metadata harvesting/ingest, training (on-site and virtual), and our subgranting program.
In 2017, DLG began its subgranting program to broaden partner participation. Designed to provide smaller organizations experience with grant proposal development and a low barrier to entry, the program provides digitization services costing up to $7500 to applicants. DLG staff provides applicants with office hour support to help them frame their proposals. Applications are reviewed by a panel consisting of representatives from the Georgia Public Library Service, Historic Records Advisory Board, Humanities Council, Council for the Arts, and representatives from the larger DLG partner community. Moreover, awardees’ holdings are exposed widely as all project metadata is included in the DLG portal and the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). Awardees include the Athens-Clarke County Library, Augusta-Richmond County Public Library System, Atlanta History Center, Berry College, City of Savannah, Research Library & Municipal Archives, Coastal Heritage Society, Columbus State University , Georgia State University Libraries, the Juliette Gordon Low Birthplace, Oconee Regional Library System, Piedmont College Library, Valdosta State University Archives and Special Collections, and Walter J. Brown Media Archives and Peabody Awards Collection. These projects help provide a view of the state’s diversity as they document not only the growth of Savannah, but also the LGBTQ community in Atlanta, Chinese-Americans in Augusta, and African American life in Athens and North Georgia during the 1970s and 1980s. The next slate of awardees will be announced in December.
