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ZSR digitizes Wait's manuscripts
By Whitaker Grannis
Old Gold and Black Reporter

The university’s documentation has come a long way since Samuel Wait, founder and first president of Wake Forest College, first started writing down the school’s history.

Nearly 175 years later, his personal and professional correspondences, journals, and artifacts were digitally scanned and placed on the Internet to preserve the records forever.

This summer the special collections and archives section of the Z. Smith Reynolds library received a federal grant to make digital copies of the Wait collection available on the Internet.

"This collection is important because it details the founding of Wake Forest University, the early history of the Baptist church in North Carolina, and the life of a woman in the early19th century raising children," Sharon Snow, team leader for special collections and archives, said.

Sally Wait, Samuel Wait’s wife, shares a prominent place in the collection. "You don’t get a lot of letters on the woman’s perspective on raising children in early the 1800’s," Snow said.

This is the first federal grant the Z. Smith Reynolds library has received. The money was given to North Carolina and the state library and administered by the North Carolina Exploring Cultural Heritage Online digitization program.

Twenty academic institutions and libraries applied, and the university received one of 11 grants.

More than $23,000 was granted to the project.

This money funded equipment for scanning and posting the collection, paid graduate students and funded travel to Wait’s original church in New Bern.

The project was quickly completed this summer. "We had strict deadlines we had to meet," Snow said. This grant was unusual because it required the work be completed in six months instead of a year or more.

The digital collection includes scanned copies of the original documents, Word document transcripts; and digital photos.

The documents range in topic from the lack of Baptist presence in early North Carolina to sales receipts for construction of the original campus.

The first baccalaureate address, given at the first graduation in 1839, is also included.

The collection can be accessed via the Z Smith Reynolds library’s Web page at www.wfu.edu/Library/special/wait/.

In the future the equipment will be used to archive more of Wait’s correspondences.

Other notable collections could also find a new home online soon. Maya Angelou’s collection of film and theater works may be digitized next.