By Jon Winter, Business Manager for the Douglas County Historical Society in Superior and site supervisor for CCDC Team DCHS. Jon is a lifelong resident of Douglas County with family roots in the County dating back to the early 1890s.
Curating digital collections brings together under one roof two of my greatest interests: history and computers. I started a computer business in 1988 that I still operate today. I work with a variety of small business, local government and non-profit clients with a wide range of computer needs. My passion for history started in the 4th grade with a subject Exploring Wisconsin. I really excelled at the subject and as a gift, my teacher Mrs. Farmakes let me keep my textbook because they were going to be replaced with a new edition the following year. My first introduction to local history came in the 8th grade in Mr. Gidley’s US History class. Mr. Gidley included units on local history that I found very interesting and sparked an interest in Douglas County history.
All my adult life I’ve been an active reader with most of my interest in local fiction with real locations woven into the storyline and non-fiction personal and family stories of life in Northwestern Wisconsin. I was a member of the Douglas County Historical Society, however, did not take an active role until late 2012. I joined the Board of Trustees in 2013 and served as Board President and later Treasurer until December of last year.
Due to needed budget cuts and reduced paid staff hours our Director left our organization at the end of last year. I agreed to come on as Business Manager for at least one year at the Board’s discretion, as we work together to improve the organization’s financial health. Officially, my job did not start until January 1st, however, over the Christmas break, I started to review emails and other work in progress. One email caught my eye was the opportunity to work with Recollection Wisconsin and Curating Community Digital Collections. Our board had discussed opportunities to get more of our collection online as another potential revenue source, to both encourage membership and sell reproduction photographs. I saw this as an opportunity to improve the preservation of our photograph collection and in particular our David F. Barry collection of local images and images from the Dakotas.
Curating Community Digital Collections application was due on January 2nd and it was already December 30th when I first became aware of the opportunity. I’ve worked on tight deadlines before and felt very strongly our greatest need was the long-term preservation of our David F. Barry collection. For digital archiving, I’m in a unique position with my 30+ year career in small business IT. Over the past several years I’ve come to greater appreciate the superior quality in many cases of film and older media formats such as the glass plates that Barry used.
Much of our collection was scanned with at less-than-ideal resolutions and file formats with the need for improvements and standardization. This was also a great opportunity for professional growth in the IT field. Fortunately, I didn’t have any set plans for New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day. The next 48 hours were a cram session of application writing. We were very fortunate to be selected as a CCDC location for 2019!
One of our obstacles to overcome was our distance from both Madison and Milwaukee, where most of the CCDC students reside. Taylor Kelley, our student intern, lives in the Milwaukee area and will make several trips to our location over the summer. To aid in her work, I set up a computer on our network for both on-site and remote use. Using technology, I use to support my computer clients, Taylor is able to log in to our network remotely and work with our collection, without adding any additional exposure or risk to our network security.
One of the takeaways from the experience already is the understanding that digital preservation isn’t a destination but the creation of the ongoing processes for acquisition, storage, accessibility and maintaining with verification of the ongoing state of digital collections.
I’m looking forward to our effort over this summer and the creation of our digital preservation policies leading to improvements with our digital collection preservation and accessibility. I’d like to thank all those involved with the 2019 CCDC opportunity, including students, supervisors, mentors, and the Recollections Wisconsin/CCDC staff.
For more information about Curating Community Digital Collections, visit https://recollectionwisconsin.org/digipres.
This project is made possible by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, #RE-85-17-0127-17.
