North Carolina ECHO (Exploring Cultural Heritage Online) is an online portal to online special collections of North Carolina's libraries, archives, museums, historic sites, and other cultural institutions.

NC ECHO began as an initiative to increase online access to the state's “specialized resources” by comprehensively surveying collections held in all of North Carolina’s cultural heritage institutions. North Carolina was one of the first states to undertake such a survey effort.

Survey results provided the basis on which to build a statewide program that includes education and outreach opportunities, the development and maintenance of standards and guidelines for digitization, an institutional database and links to digital collections, and a grant program to help cultural institutions across North Carolina create and promote their digitized collections.

Funded through a Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) grant and managed by the State Library of North Carolina, NC ECHO’s mission is to “promote the use of digital technologies to broaden and enhance access to North Carolina’s cultural heritage.”

PROJECT COMPONENTS

• NC ECHO Web portal, which provides information on over 950 North Carolina cultural repositories
• Comprehensive needs assessment and statistical survey and site visits to all North Carolina cultural institutions.
• Continuing education programs to teach digitization and traditional special collection skills
• Standards and best practices for digitization
• Digitization grant program that supports collaborative digitization projects
• Facilitation of collaboration among North Carolina’s cultural institutions
• Consultations on special collections activities through site visits and cross-repository community-building;
• Development of online resources for K-12 teachers

PARTNER INSTITUTIONS

NC ECHO is comprised of any North Carolina institution that “maintains a permanent, non-living collection of unique materials held for research and/or exhibit purposes open for the use of the public.”

NC ECHO partners stretch 888 miles from the Cherokee County Historical Museum in Murphy to Roanoke Island Festival Park in Manteo. They include small, volunteer-run community crossroads museums as well as nationally recognized research institutions. Such diverse institutions representing North Carolina history and culture maintain and care for millions of resources. Through collaboration, NC ECHO facilitates the common goal of making their collections and stories accessible online.

A list of all of NC ECHO's partner institutions is available in the institutional database.