Archives Collections Added to the Lowcountry Digital Library

The Lowcountry Digital Library is a platform that produces the digitized collections of its eighteen (and growing) partner organizations. With a focus on the Lowcountry region of South Carolina, it serves a wide audience of scholars, students, educators, and many other types of patrons across the world. As a regional repository of the South Carolina Digital Library, which is a service hub of the Digital Public Library of America, the accessibility to the hundreds of diverse collections is vast.Historic Charleston Foundation has been involved with the Lowcountry Digital Library since its inception and was one of the first partner organizations to contribute collections to it, beginning with the Civic Services Committee Papers. Many additional collections in a variety of formats followed and to date, forty-seven collections from HCF’s Archives are accessible on the Lowcountry Digital Library. Most of HCF’s digitized collections pertain to Charleston buildings/architecture and HCF’s historic preservation efforts and programs. The Ansonborough Rehabilitation Project, Photographic Survey of the “Charleston Center” Site, and the White Pine Series of Architectural Monographs are just three examples. Other materials include tourist publications, photographs of the 1886 Earthquake, books on "Colonial" architecture and furniture/furnishings, and film footage taken at Mulberry Plantation from 1927-1932.Two additions from Historic Charleston Foundation’s Archives were added in the past few weeks.

• An Architectural Guide to Charleston features the history and architectural description of many prominent Charleston buildings, arranged by period (Colonial, post-Revolutionary, Antebellum, and post-Civil War). Written by noted architects Albert Simons and W.H. Johnson Thomas, the manuscript was compiled by Historic Charleston Foundation to be presented to the members of the Society of Architectural Historians at its meeting in Charleston in 1971.

Architectural Guide to Charleston

• The Art Work of Charleston is twelve-part, mostly pictorial publication about Charleston and the vicinity. Distributed throughout the parts is an essay describing Charleston’s history and development. The photographs feature buildings, residences, churches, street views, river views, historic gardens, cemeteries, railroad structures, phosphate mining activity, and wharves. It was published in 1893 by W. H. Parish (Chicago, Illinois).

Art Work of Charleston

New collections are added throughout the year, so visit the Lowcountry Digital Library site often. Oral histories are coming soon! For more information, contact Karen Emmons.