Announcing the Recollection Wisconsin Digitization Initiative

[Kristen Whitson]

We’re thrilled to announce a new initiative supporting Wisconsin local history organizations in their digitization work!

The aptly-named Recollection Wisconsin Digitization Initiative is a collaborative endeavor which brings together Wisconsin organizations with local history collections (public libraries, museums, archives, and local history or community organizations) and Wisconsin information school graduate students to digitize and publicly share new collections via Recollection Wisconsin.

We invite new content partners with a desire to digitize and share their unique local history collections to apply for this program! We’ll help you hone your project plan and prepare your work environment. And, we’ll pair you with an information school graduate student to get the work done.

Selected students will complete a range of digitization-related tasks including scanning, metadata creation, project management and documentation, and digital file organization and management. Student participants will receive a stipend and academic credit for their work. We’re excited to offer this hands-on opportunity for Wisconsin graduate students (and future information professionals!) to put theory into practice! **We are particularly looking for interested graduate school students from UW-Madison's Information School to be placed in the fall of 2024. If you know of students who might be interested, please pass this information along to them!**

As part of an ongoing commitment to expanding our collection focus, we’re particularly interested in adding new resources that document lesser-known stories about Wisconsin history and the people who have inhabited our great state including Native, immigrant and LGBTQ communities; women’s stories; and, in general, materials that document unique aspects of Wisconsin business, industry, tourism, cities and architecture, natural landscape and resources or military veterans. Digitized collections will be hosted and publicly accessible in Recollection Wisconsin. Content partners will receive a copy of their digital files and metadata for their own use.

The Recollection Wisconsin Digitization Initiative helps us reach one of our key strategic goals for 2023-2025: targeted outreach to organizations in non-participating Wisconsin counties and in other underrepresented community groups. Expanding participation in Recollection Wisconsin means more stories told and more historical records available documenting our state’s rich history.

A familiar face rejoins our team to lead this initiative. As project manager, Vicki Tobias will work closely with selected host sites to plan and organize their digitization project ideas. Students and content partners will receive basic training in digitization best practices, digital preservation, collection development, and metadata creation. We’re equally excited to make good use of resources and training materials created as part of recent Recollection Wisconsin community-based and collaborative learning, and digital curation projects including Curating Community Digital Collections, Digital Readiness Community of Practice, and our very favorite training resource, the Digital Readiness Toolkit!

Thanks to support from the state of Wisconsin (On, Wisconsin!), we are able to offer this opportunity in Fall 2024, Spring 2025 and Summer 2025. Beyond 2025? Opportunities will depend on future budget decisions, so if you love this program, we’ll be asking for your help in advocating for continued funding!

Thanks much,

The Recollection Wisconsin Team

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Kristen Whitson (she/her) Digital Specialist and Consortia Manager WiLS kri...@wils.org  |  608.571.3941  |  wils.org The Ideas to Action Fund application period is open! Share your project ideas with us by June 3rd for a chance to receive $5000 toward the work.