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I have a few bits of news to pass along today. First, the North Carolina State Archives will be closed Monday, January 16th for the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday. If you ever want to know which state holidays we’re closed for, you can always consult the Hours page on our website.

Second, December was a very busy month for the Information Management Branch, the unit responsible for scanning, websites, social media and metadata here at the State Archives. On top of the WPA Cemetery Survey Records (which you may have read about earlier this week), we added Christmas cards, photos of Raleigh’s Jolly’s Jewelers, and a new Civil War diary to the North Carolina Digital Collections, our joint project with the State Library of North Carolina. January is turning out to be just as busy; here are some of the NC Digital Collections projects that are underway this month:

• Letters and other items from the Williams-Womble Papers are the newest addition to our online Civil War materials;
• I am working on the metadata for a group of United States Army Signal Corps photographs that Tiffanie scanned in late 2011. A few of those items are already available in the World War I Collection; look for all of the photographs to be online probably around March 2012. These materials will be added to a couple of small groups of correspondence that are already available in the World War I Collection, including the letters of James W. Alston, an African-American 1st Lieutenant who served in the 372nd Infantry, and Arthur Bluethenthal, who served in the American Ambulance Field Service.

And finally, it’s been a while since I updated the readers of History For All the People on the First Wednesday series that our Civil War Sesquicentennial Committee has been writing. In fact, the last Civil War Round Up on this blog was in June and since then:

• In July, Sarah Bliss wrote about the Confederate government’s interest in locating a prison depot in Salisbury;
• In August, Chris wrote a post called “How to sink a ship!” about a letter sent to Governor Henry Toole Clark with plans for how to destroy vessels blockading the North Carolina coast;
• The September posts focused on the decision by a few junior Confederate officers to abandon several coastal forts and the reactions of Eastern North Carolina communities to being occupied by Union forces;
• The “Chicamacomico Races” were the focus of the October First Wednesday post;
• In November, Chris told the story of Reverend Marble Nash Taylor and his attempts to form a new wartime government for North Carolina;
• In December, William “Bill” Brown focused on turmoil between Conservatives and the Confederate Party in North Carolina politics;
• And this month, Chris wrote the first of several blog posts about the Burnside Expedition.

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