Digital Durham

2025 Updates to Digital Durham website

With the support of Duke's OIT office, the content of Digital Durham has been migrated into a more stable site. We have had to make a few changes to the original Digital Durham site to provide free access to the personal papers, maps, photographs, ledger book accounts, printed works and other materials on the site.

July 9, 2025

Here is a summary of the most recent changes to the site:

Changes to searching Personal Papers:

The 2025 website offers a selection of 125 letters drawn from three collections of Personal Papers held by the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library. We have created an index which lists the authors' names in each collection. The list of authors are organized alphabetically by last name.

In updating this site, we have made 67 pieces of correspondence from the Richard Harvey Wright Papers accessible. Most of these letters have been transcribed.

We have also made changes to bibliographic information throughout the site. If an item was listed as belonging to the “Rare Book, Manuscript and Special Collection Library” at Duke University, we have updated the name of the repository to the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library.

In updating this site, we realized that a letter from the James Southgate Papers dated 8 September 1885 in the original site was actually penned by Bettie Ann Cunningham not James Southgate.

Changes in the Public Records section of the website:

The Public Records section does not provide a link to the searchable1880 census database. We were not able to archive this interactive software, so we will be exploring ways to make that data available to teachers, students, and researchers.

Changes to the Browse page:

In 2007, when we first launched Digital Durham as a dynamic site, the Browse page offered a button marked "Business Records." The "Business Records" button gave users access to 11 accounts from tan 1880 ledger from the Atlas M. Rigsbee Ledger. This material can be accessed via the "Ledger Book" button on the 2025 site.

At some point between 2007 and 2025, four broadsides got separated from the Miscellany category. The 2025 site has a category called "Miscellany" which contains the same items that appeared in the 2007 version of this site. There are 17 items including broadsides, advertising, report cards and other ephemera.

The copyright interest in the material in this digital collection has not been transferred to the Digital Durham project. These text and images may not be used for any commercial purpose without the permission of the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library and the Digital Durham Project. Copyright permission for subsequent uses is the responsibility of the user.