It’s been a long time coming, but we are very excited to announce the launch of our newest digital collection, The Hood-Williamson Digital Collection on Serpent Handlers of Southern Appalachia. The Hood-Williamson archives, held in the Special Collections of the library, is a very important and unique collection of primary source videos documenting the serpent handling churches of Southern Appalachia. The videos see quite a bit of in-house use from researchers and we field many requests from researchers all over the world who are interested in the collection. Until this point however, we have been unable to offer any remote viewing options to the global audience for this collection.
The launch of the online collection will be completed in installments, the first of which is now live and available for use. As the collection statement indicates, the full collection will “consist of a range of the available materials covering several years of services at each church and all of the interviews Drs. Hood and Williamson conducted.” This initial installment includes 4 church services from the legendary Jolo, West Virginia Church of the Lord Jesus and 6 interviews with serpent handling practitioners. The digital collection will grow over time to include around 40 church services (in their entirety) and 35 interviews with serpent handling practitioners.
We highly recommend using either the Google Chrome or Internet Explorer browser to view the videos. Selecting another browser may result in significant playback delays.
We would love to hear your thoughts on the collection via email at archives@utc.edu or by giving us a call at 423-425-2186.
This post was previously published on the UTC Special Collections blog.