The South Carolina Digital Library (SCDL) is a collaborative effort that includes South Carolina’s schools, libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural heritage institutions. SCDL’s mission is to encourage our collaborators to create, maintain, and promote digital collections that represent South Carolina's historical and cultural resources while following state-level guidelines that are based on national standards and best practices. SCDL intends to be the model for other institutions digitizing materials in the state, and will strive to provide the knowledge, resources, and capacity necessary for those institutions to complete their digital projects. SCDL also seeks to enhance the overall education and scholarship of South Carolina's citizens by coordinating free and unlicensed access to these digital collections through a central web presence.

First and foremost, SCDL envisions a central web presence servicing the South Carolina community through open access to the digital collections available in the state. We envision that SCDL ultimately will become an indispensable research tool for K-12 students, researchers in higher education, and other life-long learners as they visit the SCDL website to study and compare documents concerning South Carolina’s history and culture. Educators will also find SCDL’s range of digital collections to be an invaluable source of material for dynamic and interactive lesson plans. These educators and users will add another dimension to SCDL’s material by contributing their own knowledge about the items available online to the learning community through a system of open communication and transparency that encourages sharing information and maintaining collaborations. The web site will give greater access to the rare and special South Carolina historical materials housed in the many museums, libraries, archives, and historical institutions in the state.

SCDL’s essential foundation is based upon a set of core values that inform and guide our services and practices. These values include access, life-long education and scholarship, collaboration, duty to the citizens of South Carolina, and a commitment to the public dissemination of South Carolina’s history and culture.