Recollection Wisconsin and the Wisconsin Public Library Consortium (WPLC), together with several statewide partners, are pleased to share a new white paper, Facilitating a Wisconsin Newspaper Portal. This white paper lays out the current landscape of digitized historical newspapers in Wisconsin and offers a tiered plan toward a long-term goal: a centralized, statewide repository and discovery tool for digitized local historical newspapers.
The white paper grew out of a September 2025 Newspaper Think Tank held at UW-Milwaukee, where representatives from public library systems, historical societies, academic libraries, and the Wisconsin Historical Society gathered to discuss the challenges and opportunities around newspaper digitization and access. That conversation, along with years of partner input gathered by Recollection Wisconsin and the WPLC Historical and Local Digital Collections Committee, formed the foundation for the paper.
The white paper grew out of a September 2025 Newspaper Think Tank held at UW-Milwaukee, where representatives from public library systems, historical societies, academic libraries, and the Wisconsin Historical Society gathered to discuss the challenges and opportunities around newspaper digitization and access. That conversation, along with years of partner input gathered by Recollection Wisconsin and the WPLC Historical and Local Digital Collections Committee, formed the foundation for the paper.
The paper confirms with data what many in Wisconsin’s cultural heritage community already suspected: hundreds of thousands of newspaper pages in the state have already been digitized but live on a fragmented set of various platforms, each with different access policies and metadata practices. The paper offers a tiered approach to next steps: starting with an information-gathering phase, moving to a resource creation process to assist the cultural heritage community in digitizing and providing access to their own digitized newspaper collections, and eventually a full program phase to design and launch a portal. While the Wisconsin Historical Society is a natural eventual host for such a centralized portal, their current priorities make this a longer-term goal.
We’re grateful to everyone who contributed time, expertise, and input to this project. We hope to use the white paper for future resource requests to explain both the gaps in Wisconsin’s newspaper infrastructure and the deep bench of expertise, interest, and determination to move toward a unified solution.
