Posted on: Tuesday, January 25, 2005
Many museums putting collections online
By Martha Irvine
Associated Press
MADISON, Wis. — It's a stately old building with looming columns, worn marble stairways and arched doorways — dedicated in 1900 "to the conservation, advancement and dissemination of American Heritage."
Andy Manis • Associated Press American Journeys: www.americanjourneys.org National Archives: www.nara.gov So the historical society and many other institutions with large collections are doing something they see as means of survival: They're going digital — creating and uploading images of many items in their collections for all the World Wide Web to see.
"History belongs to everybody; it shouldn't be locked away in dark rooms," says Michael Edmonds, deputy administrator of the Wisconsin Historical Society's library-archives division. "It should be on everybody's laptops at Starbucks."
The movement to "digitize" collections received a lot of attention last month when popular search engine Google announced a deal with several university libraries to put their books — or snippets of those books — online. Users would have greatest access to books with content that's not limited by copyright constraints.
But even before Google began scanning books, many libraries, archives and museums had already been quietly digitizing their most popular and rarest of collections and, increasingly, creating Web sites that put those collections in context.
It's a trend that Edmonds calls "revolutionary" — and necessary.
"Our future depends on us being able to turn our collections inside out — to show people what we have," he says.
Starting in 1999 with a $100,000 gift from a retired Wisconsin professor, staff members at the institution have been using some of their limited money to scan thousands of digital images of rare older books and archived letters.
One result has been a Web site called American Journeys, which details eyewitness accounts of early exploration in this country and includes such rare maps as the first published drawing of the entire Mississippi River, done by French explorers in the late 1600s.
By many accounts, the site has been a success. While the society's building, which contains about 30 miles of library and archives shelves, attracts about 50,000 visitors a year, American Journeys and other online content taken from those shelves is already drawing more than 85,000 unique Internet visitors annually.
Archivists across the country are seeing similar results.
"The best thing about it is that we're able to get materials into the hands of people who would never have gotten them," says Lee Ann Potter, head of education and volunteer programs at the National Archives & Records Administration in Washington.
But while the Wisconsin Historical Society contains one of the largest American history archives anywhere, fewer people have visited in recent years — 40 percent fewer than in 1987 — as more of them, including students at the nearby University of Wisconsin, turn to the Internet as their basic research tool.
Archivists Andy Kraushaar, left, and Peter Gottlieb look over printed materials created from digital files at the Wisconsin Historical Society in Madison. The agency is putting much of its collection online.
Learn more:
