In 2011 Robert B. Ariail donated an extraordinary collection of historical astronomy to the University of South Carolina and the South Carolina State Museum. Over the past half-century, Mr. Ariail built a collection that encompassed both historic telescopes and astronomical instruments, now at the State Museum, and more than 5,000 rare books and other published items, now housed in the University's Irvin Department of Rare Books & Special Collections.

This digital project was completed by Kayla Burns (MLIS 2011), Kristen Amsden (MLIS 2011), Michael Weisenburg, and John Knox. Burns scanned the postcards on an Epson 10000 XL flatbed scanner and created metadata following Dublin Core Metadata Best Practices. Other materials in the collection were scanned on the Avision bookedge scanner and Zeutschel overhead scanner. This work could not have been done without the help of Tom Falvey, director of education at the SC State Museum, Elizabeth Sudduth, director of Rare Books Dept, and Tony Branch, systems administrator for the CONTENTdm database.