Highlights Archives
Entire Magazine of History Archive to Go Online
Thanks to generous support from Milwaukee's Schoenleber Foundation and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the entire contents of the Wisconsin Magazine of History and its predecessor, Wisconsin Historical Collections, will soon be available for free here on the Society's Web site. Spanning 150 years of research on Wisconsin history, the new digital collection will make more than 3,500 articles instantly available to students, teachers, genealogists, and everyone else who values our heritage.
Most of the words written about Wisconsin history were printed in one or the other of these two publications. The Collections ran from 1855 until the First World War, and contains old settlers' memoirs, interviews with Indian elders, original documents from French colonial archives and much more. In 1915 Society leaders decided to abandon the ponderous scholarly tomes of the Collections and launched the Wisconsin Magazine of History, which they "hoped to make as interesting as might be to the ordinary reader." It has appeared every three months ever since, bringing scholarly articles (PDF), popular features (PDF), book reviews (PDF), and marvelous photos to an ever-widening circle of readers.
To make available this immense storehouse of knowledge about our state, the Society will provide clean paper copies to the university's Digital Collections Center, whose staff will scan all 30,000 pages into electronic form. These page images will be processed to a Web-friendly format and converted to searchable text using CONTENTdm, the software application in which our American Journeys and Turning Points collections have been built. Society and university staff will work together to catalog each article, so users will be able to find all the essays or documents relating to any person, place, event or subject. In addition, every word on all 30,000 pages will be retrievable in a keyword search. Nearly the entire cost of the project is being underwritten by a generous grant from the Schoenleber Foundation, whose leaders saw the value to all the state's citizens in having easy access to their common heritage, and by the UW-Madison's General Library System, which recognized the importance of these core documents to students and faculty throughout the university system.
Volumes will be made public gradually, as the processing of them is completed. We hope the first will appear about the time that daffodils begin to wave their heads in the spring breezes, and that the most recent articles will be available before the end of the 2006.
:: Posted February 27, 2006
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