KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — The numbers are impressive: 75,000 books. 4,000 linear feet of manuscripts and papers, 20,000 reels of microfilm, 250,000 photos and negatives, third largest newspaper collection in TN.
Hundreds of thousands of items make up the Knox County Public Library Calvin M. McClung Historical Collection at the East Tennessee History Center.
That's a long name for a large collection of rare resources which not only includes books and documents but also things like blue prints and movie tickets and maps.
You can access it from anywhere online. Well, at least part of it. About 1% is digitized.
"If we don't scan them and show people what we have then they live down in my basement and no one knows about them," McClung Archivist Joanne Bouldin said.
McClung Collection Manager Steve Cotham sees the value of an accessible online catalog.
"If somebody asks for a particularly rare item that's in our collection, rather than just copy it for one person I weigh putting it online and I've done that a lot with a really, really rare book or document or photograph," he said.
The negatives and photos there date back to 1907.
Joanne Bouldin said, "They tell a different story of Knoxville from what you just can see in the newspaper in print."
One current project is scanning each page of old Knoxville College yearbooks. She comes up with searchable keywords for each page and uses OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to make sure every name shows up in a search.
It's a modern way to make history available.
One particular item is the most popular online right now.
"The suffrage letter that Harry T. Burn Junior got from his mother, Febb, in the big vote in Nashville in 1920 when the women's suffrage amendment was passed," Cotham said.
In the letter Febb urged her son to help put the rat in ratification and to be a good boy and vote for suffrage. He changed his vote and broke a tie. Tennessee was the 36th state to ratify the 19th Amendment making a woman's right to vote the law of the land.
"We have the letter. We have a photo of mama. We have a photo of Harry online and those are the most requested things we have right now because everyone is planning something on the suffrage movement next year," he said.
Steve Cotham has no expectation that all of the other 99% of the collection will end up in the digital collection. And that's ok.
"Our goal is to let the people know the kinds of things we have in the Collection and to hope that we'll get them to come and look deeper into the Collection," he said.
The McClung Collection is preserving the history of East Tennessee.
"It's the story of who we were which is the story of who we are today. You just have to put all the pieces together," he said.