With initial funding from federal Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) in December of 2003, the Mississippi Digital Library (MDL) has grown and developed from its original focus of civil rights era materials to encompass the general history and cultural heritage of Mississippi. The main mission of Mississippi Digital Library is to provide access to primary source materials from the state. The MDL began as a partnership between Delta State University, Jackson State University, the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Tougaloo College, the University of Mississippi, and the University of Southern Mississippi. Since its founding more university and archival institutions such as the Beauvoir Digital Collection and the Katrina Research Center Digital Collection have been added to the collection.
The homepage of the Mississippi Digital Library is clean and simple. It features a large map of the state to the right and search and browse links to the left. Exploring the site via the browse link takes the user to another page which drills down into browsing by Institution, Format, or Time Period. From Institution, it is possible to search the individual contributor's collections; browsing by Format is set up to browse by: Books, Cartoons, Documents, Finding Aids, Illustrations, Images, Maps, Objects, and Oral Histories. The amount of digitized information is impressive. Of particular interest is the de Grummond Children's Book collection comprising late nineteenth and early twentieth century children's books. Several stories within the collection include multiple versions of the Cinderella story, Little Red Riding Hood, and Jack and the Beanstalk also known as Jack and the Giant Killer. Users can zoom and print from over 150 books, and each individual record has an Add to Favorites and Reference URL feature, useful for recording and bookmarking items. Another impressive part of the MDL is its vast stock of images – 3,905 to be exact. Some of the most fascinating images and digitized memorabilia come from the Freedom Summer Collection. The group of images documents the events of June 1964 when volunteers came to Mississippi to register as many African‐American voters as they could before the upcoming presidential elections. There are scanned ballots, theatre tickets to a performance of the Freedom Riders, and community fliers urging participation in the Civil Rights movement. The wealth of digitized historical ephemera adds greatly to the content in this repository. Some of the photos are not of particular artistic merit; however, their inherent value is not just in the image they capture, but in the detailed record attached to each one and the history they document. A lot of worthwhile effort was involved in collecting and cataloguing the metadata. The functionality of the site is also good. Individual records open in new windows, allowing users to view several objects at once. From the homepage there are links to help and information for the MDL, as well as linking to the Mississippi Department of Archives and History Digital Archives. Underneath the map of Mississippi on the homepage there is a link to the some HTML coding which would enable a user to add a widget of the MDL to his or her blog or website.
With all of the interest contained on the pages the Mississippi Digital Library, it would be nice to see some better marketing. A page on Facebook or a Twitter account linked to this depository might enhance the features of this repository and make the information easier to share. The history is there, but the conversation is not.
