» Holding Memory: Inside the Lousise Holmes Scrapbook Collection
This blog post is written by Kayla Blanchard, who is a graduate assistant for the Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture during the 2025-2026 academic year. Blanchard is a student in the College of Charleston's History department.
During my time as a graduate assistant at the College of Charleston, I began working at the Lowcountry Digital History Initiative (LDHI), assisting with the curation of digital history exhibits for the College of Charleston’s libraries. In curating these exhibits, I constantly searched library databases for digitized photos to convey a compelling story. The process of researching, understanding keywords, and working closely with how different institutions wrote their metadata slowly prepared me for the role I took at Avery in Spring 2026, where I digitized and wrote metadata for their collections.
In this work, I prioritized inclusive and culturally responsive metadata practices, ensuring that the descriptions reflected both historical accuracy and respect for the communities represented. I also focused on enhancing the discoverability of Avery’s archival materials, making them more accessible to a wider audience of researchers, students, and the public.
This semester, I worked on scanning images, letters, and scrapbook pages from the Louise F. Holmes Scrapbook collection in Avery’s archives and compiled 157 individual lines of metadata to be ingested into the Lowcountry Digital Library.LCDL is a collaborative digital initiative hosted by the College of Charleston that provides free access to over 50,000 digitized primary sources that document the history, culture, and environment of the South Carolina Lowcountry. The archives are the heart of the Avery Research Center, and by digitizing and creating metadata for one of their collections, researchers everywhere have access to the Avery Research Center’s collections.
The Louise F. Holmes scrapbook collection contained materials that reflect the life of African Americans in the Lowcountry of South Carolina, including newspaper clippings, photographs of her family, correspondence from friends, family, and organizations like the South Carolina Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs and the United States Department of the Interior Freedmen’s Hospital.
Though many of the materials in this collection are based in Florence, South Carolina, Louise Holmes and her husband, Dr. William Francis Holmes, were both graduates of the Avery Normal Institute (1888 and 1880). They later relocated to Florence, where Louise worked as a teacher, and Dr. Holmes served as an educator, physician, and activist with the Florence Branch of the NAACP.
What stood out to me while digitizing this collection was following the highs and lows of Louise Holmes’ life through her love for poetry. The collection made me stand still in time and reflect on Southern Black American traditions, such as collecting obituaries, newspaper clippings, and other printed materials that hold personal and familial meaning. For every milestone in her life, Louise found a poem that perfectly encapsulated her emotions, especially after the passing of her husband, with multiple pages in the scrapbook dedicated to his life and legacy.
Louise’s Scrapbook also reflects a strong cultural awareness, as she collected histories of racial debates from various newspapers and documented major milestones in African American actors breaking into predominantly white spaces in the 1930s.
This is why creating accessible metadata matters. Working with the Louise F. Holmes Scrapbook collection showed me that metadata is not just about organization, but about visibility. The way collections are described directly impacts how they are found, understood, and used. By taking care in how these materials are labeled and contextualized, this project helps make Black histories in the Lowcountry more accessible to researchers and the public. This experience also strengthened my understanding of archival work and reinforced the importance of thoughtful, intentional description in preserving community histories.