Augusta (Ga.) – Page 4

June 10, 2020June 9, 2020

Digital Library of Georgia (DLG) awards three Competitive Digitization service grants to Georgia cultural heritage institutions across the state

ATHENS, Ga. — Three institutions are recipients of the seventh set of service grants awarded in a program intended to broaden partner participation in the DLG. The DLG solicited proposals for historic digitization projects in a statewide call, and applicants submitted proposals for projects with a cost of up to $7,500.00. DLG staff will provide free digitization, scanning, and hosting services so that more of Georgia’s diverse history can be found online for free. This subgranting program was presented the 2018 Award for Excellence in Archival Program Development by a State Institution by the Georgia Historical Records Advisory Council (GHRAC).

The recipients and their projects include:

Lee County Library (Leesburg, Ga.)

Digitization of the Lee County Library Local History Collection which contains print material dating from 1784-2000 that includes church histories, local Lee County history, and documentation of the 1994 Southwest Georgia flood.

Saint Paul’s Church (Augusta, Ga.)

Description and hosting of the handwritten vestry minutes, parish and marriage registers, and commemorative materials of Saint Paul’s Church, Augusta’s oldest congregation founded in 1750.

Hargrett Library, University Archives

Digitization of the University of Georgia’s Pandora yearbooks dating from 1965-1974, which include the aftermath of desegregation, the beginnings of the black student, the women’s liberation, the gay liberation, and the campus free speech movements.

Preference in the selection process was given to proposals from institutions that had not yet collaborated with the DLG. Saint Paul’s Church and the Lee County Library are both new partners for the DLG. Sheila McAlister, director of the Digital Library of Georgia notes: “Our latest slate of projects includes two new partners, a public library and a church archives. The projects document the history of Lee County, the activities of one of the oldest churches in Augusta, and student life at the University of Georgia during a period of enormous social change. With each new project, we’re able to illuminate more of the state’s history.”

About the Lee County Library

The Lee County Library is a public library serving the Lee County, Georgia area. Learn more on their website at leecountylibrary.org/.

About Saint Paul’s Church

Saint Paul’s Church is a community of people committed to the service and worship of Jesus Christ in their current location for over 250 years. With their roots deeply embedded in the city of Augusta and the surrounding area they “seek and serve Christ in all persons.” They are also rooted in their Anglican (Church of England) heritage and are an integral part of the Episcopal Diocese of Georgia. Visit their web site at www.saintpauls.org/.

About Hargrett Library, University Archives

The University of Georgia Archives preserves over two centuries of the University’s history in the form of official records, images, plans, publications, and artifacts. Their mission is to acquire, organize, preserve, and publicize such materials and to assist researchers in their use. Visit them at libs.uga.edu/hargrett/archives/.

June 4, 2019June 27, 2019

Augusta University Theater Performances based on “Vanishing Georgia” Photographs

Augusta University students performing in Theatre AUG’s production “Moving Photographs: A Vanishing Georgia.” This performance is based on a photograph of dental students with corpse at Atlanta Dental College, Atlanta, Georgia, ca. 1908 (ric016)

“Moving Photographs: A Vanishing Georgia” is the result of a research and creative scholarship project I have been working on for quite some time now. I was introduced to the Vanishing Georgia collection about ten years ago while teaching as a Lecturer in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Georgia. I dabbled in the archive for research purposes and taught a special topics course, titled Visual Culture, Rhetoric and Performance, in which students learned methods for analyzing and performing images from the Vanishing Georgia collection.

In spring 2018, I was awarded a research grant by the Augusta University Pamplin College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, where I currently am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication. The grant enabled me to move the project toward a fully staged theater production, a dream I have had for a while now. With the project, I was (and still am) interested in exploring the stories and memories evoked through the performance of the photographs, and how these glimpses of Georgia’s past impact culture and life in Georgia today. Over the summer, I researched the archive and began writing the script. I also created research and writing prompts for the student-performers so that we could collaborate in the script writing process. The result of our labors is a performance that uses visual, communication, theater, and performance studies theories and methodologies to critically analyze, represent, and recreate the Vanishing Georgia collection–and specifically, a selection of photographs collected from the Augusta area. Access to the photographs by means of the Digital Library of Georgia and the Georgia Archives has been pivotal to our process in both writing and staging our script. We are looking forward to sharing our archival and photographic discoveries with our community.

– Melanie O’Meara, Assistant Professor, Department of Communication
Augusta University.

Theatre AUG’s production titled “Moving Photographs: A Vanishing Georgia” ran in Augusta University’s Maxwell Performing Arts Theatre March 21- March 24, 2019.

The Vanishing Georgia Photographic Collection of almost 18,000 images is the result of a Georgia Archives project begun in the mid-1970s to locate and copy historically significant photographs held by individuals throughout Georgia. A National Endowment for the Humanities grant supported an expansion of the project from 1977-1979, and images continued to be added to the collection until 1996. Digitization of the photographs was a joint project of the Georgia Archives and the Digital Library of Georgia.