Announcement: Inventory of Library Digital Collections

The Reference and Loan Library is working with the Wisconsin Heritage Online (WHO) planning project to develop an inventory or register of websites with digital collections about Wisconsin or sites hosted by Wisconsin libraries, museums, or historical societies. The primary audience for the website is library or museum staff who are planning future digitization projects. Reference staff may also find the site useful for identifying digital collections. Staff will be able to determine if another library has already digitized specific collections and whether or not that library's collections are unique or would complement work already done. The website is a work in
progress and currently contains about 40 records. The WHO informational website is operated by WiLS and can be found at http://www.wils.wisc.edu/widigital/. It has a link to the digital collection inventory and associated data entry form on the left-hand menu. The digital collections inventory is operated by the Reference and Loan Library and can also be found at http://heritage-stwi-url.auto-graphics.com/agurl.asp

The inventory was recently demonstrated at the WHO Summit held February 22, 2005 in Madison. Library and museum staff are invited to search the database to determine if their site is already listed, and if not, to enter information about any digitized collections they are making available to the public. The form for entry of digitized collection information can be found
at and the data entry form can be found at http://heritage-stwi-urlform.auto-graphics.com/urlform.asp?id=4.

If digitized collections are not web-based, then this should be specified in the notes section. Only information about digitized collections that are about Wisconsin or hosted by Wisconsin libraries should be entered at this time. Reference and Loan Library staff will review all records entered by library or museum staff and will assign LC subject headings to each record. Contact Sally Drew (sally.drew@dpi.state.wi.us) with any questions.

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Thanks to Barbara J. Arnold at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for passing this along to me.