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Home > Partner with Us > Content Partner Resources > Recollection Wisconsin Content Partner Update Archive
Recent Blog Posts
- August 17, 2026
Recollection Wisconsin is built on a simple idea: Wisconsin’s history comes from and belongs to everyone. We are excited to share the ways that we’ve worked hard to bring that simple idea to life in the last year and a half. And what a busy year and a half it’s been! Our graduate student internship program continues to grow, with four new projects already set to begin this fall. Thanks to a partnership with UW-Madison’s iSchool Capstone Course, we now have a foundational design ready to guide improvements to our website’s usability and accessibility for all kinds of users. Through the Culture Keepers Collective, we brought digitization training to the 2026 Culture Keepers Gathering and began piloting Traditional Knowledge Notices in partnership with the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) and Local Contexts, while a statewide Newspaper Think Tank brought together library systems, historical organizations, and academic partners to begin envisioning a centralized home for Wisconsin’s digitized newspapers. None of this is possible without the partners who trust us with their collections, the state and grant funding that sustain our work, and the advocates who make us better. That includes you! We’re proud of what we have already built, and we look forward to what could come next. Read all about the year that was and a look ahead at the next one in the Recollection Wisconsin 2025-2026 Year in Review! Read the Recollection Wisconsin Year in Review
- July 28, 2026
Reading the Tribune, ca. 1948-1952. South Wood County Historical Museum. 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 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.
- May 11, 2026
Canning, ca. 1948-1952.South Wood County Historical Museum. PreserveWI, Wisconsin’s statewide digital preservation program, is moving into its next chapter. Digital preservation – the long-term, monitored storage of digital cultural heritage materials – is an essential but often underfunded part of any digitization program, and PreserveWI exists to make it achievable through shared statewide infrastructure. This collaborative initiative between Recollection Wisconsin and the Wisconsin Public Library Consortium (WPLC) is transitioning Wisconsin’s preservation infrastructure away from mirrored servers hosted at South Central Library System (SCLS) and LEANWI and into APTrust, a trusted consortium-based digital preservation service hosted at the University of Virginia and in continuous operation since 2012. This transition represents a long-term investment in a sustainable, shared digital preservation ecosystem for Wisconsin’s digital cultural heritage. This next phase builds directly on years of foundational LSTA-funded work by the WPLC digital preservation workgroup, which included piloting workflows, testing infrastructure, and onboarding participating library systems. That knowledge and experience will carry forward into PreserveWI’s work with APTrust. In this next phase, Recollection Wisconsin serves as the central administrator, managing day-to-day operations and contributor support, while WPLC provides governance and strategic oversight. APTrust membership officially begins July 1, 2026. Training for the first cohort of participating library systems is already underway, with the remaining systems coming on through the fall, and full operational launch is on track for the end of 2026. Not at a participating library system, or not a library at all? Future phases of the program will open participation to additional libraries and cultural heritage organizations through Recollection Wisconsin’s umbrella membership, so there will be a place for your institution yet. If you’re digitizing materials and wondering where they’ll live for the long haul, stay tuned!
