Mapping Charleston Recap

We are happy to announce the completion of Phase I of our Mapping Charleston project! After six months of working on our South Carolina State Historical Records Advisory Board Grant (SC SHRAB), we have catalogued over 1,706 maps and plans in our new online collections management software, PastPerfect.

To celebrate and showcase our achievements, we hosted a small exhibit for City of Charleston staff and some of our friends from the archiving world. To our 50 visitors, we presented 25 items that give a glimpse into what the collection holds, including

architectural drawings for City Hall and the Dock Street Theatre, maps of Charleston from varying points of time, and plans for projects both completed and abandoned.

This project would not have been possible without the SC SHRAB program, the City of Charleston's contribution, and the help of our team: Jacob Mossbrook, Adem Dickinson, Meghan Zimmerman, Doreen Larimer, and Kendall John.

As our project archivist, Jacob worked for six months to enter data into PastPerfect, make a preservation plan, and prepare this exhibit. He will be missed as he moves on to the Clemson Historic Preservation program beginning this fall.

We also want to give our thanks again to Adem Dickinson, our College of Charleston undergraduate student who assisted in data entry earlier this Spring. He helped us get our database off the ground with data entry.

Meghan Zimmerman, our returning high school (new graduate) intern, has helped us tremendously in our last month. Already familiar with our work, Meghan jumped in to do data entry, upload thumbnail photos, and help with the exhibit.

Doreen Larimer helped process the maps that are in our General Street Files collection, which includes brief histories of streets, correspondence, name changes, zoning changes, and plats. She also acted as our resident expert in plats and deeds, answering our questions for this new terrain.

The grant project opened the door to one of our previously inaccessible record groups. Researchers are now able to search our map holdings, view some thumbnail images, and make appointments to utilize the maps on-site. Please reach out to us at records@charleston-sc.gov if you are interested in viewing any maps in person. We are excited to explore opportunities to move into Phase II, where we will digitize the collection and upload our maps to the Lowcountry Digital Library. The thumbnails you see in PastPerfect are lower-quality scans meant to give researchers a quick look at the maps, and a second phase will enable us to produce archival scans of the collection.

We are also excited to move forward with adding additional catalog records to PastPerfect, including city reports and studies, municipal finding aids, and collection pathfinders. We have only just begun!