Community Archiving Workshop
Recollection Wisconsin is one of three national anchor sites for the Community Archiving Workshop Regional Training of Trainers program, supported by a grant from IMLS. The Community Archiving Workshop (CAW) model was developed by the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) to address the challenge of obsolescence in audiovisual collections.
Curating Community Digital Collections
In 2018 and 2019, we partnered with the iSchool at UW-Madison and UW-Milwaukee’s School of Information Studies to provide library school students with practical experience in digital stewardship and increase the capacity of small libraries and cultural heritage organizations to manage and preserve their digital content. Curating Community Digital Collections (CCDC) was supported by a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program.
Digital Readiness Community of Practice
Thanks to an implementation grant from the National Archives, Recollection Wisconsin will undertake a community-driven initiative to build “digital readiness” in local historical societies and historic preservation groups. Beginning in October 2020, Recollection Wisconsin will partner with WiLS and the Wisconsin Historical Society to convene Wisconsin local history practitioners to build a Digital Readiness Community of Practice that will increase affiliates’ capacity to create, manage and share digitized historical resources. This effort builds on work supported by a National Archives planning grant awarded to Recollection Wisconsin in 2019.
Digitization Kits for Public Libraries
Recollection Wisconsin partnered with South Central Library System to distribute digitization kits to regional public library systems. Each system manages lending the kits to their member libraries. Funding to create the kits was provided by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction.
DPLA Service Hub
Recollection Wisconsin joined the DPLA Hub Network in 2016 and now contributes over 500,000 metadata records from more than 200 Wisconsin collections to the DPLA portal.
Listening to War
Our Listening to War: Digitizing Wisconsin’s Wartime Oral Histories project, supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), is digitizing, preserving and providing access to more than 1,100 oral history interviews documenting the lives of Wisconsin veterans and civilians during wartime.
Recollection Wisconsin Digitization Initiative
Recollection Wisconsin is managing a collaborative effort to help Wisconsin organizations build digital collections, connecting content partners who have new collections to digitize with student staff who will complete digitization and metadata work as part of a practicum or independent study experience.