2025 Upper Midwest Digital Collections Conference and Minnesota Digital Library

Local history organizations often lack resources to start or continue digitization work in a sustainable manner. Students need well-organized (and paid!) opportunities to put theory into practice. Our initiative brings together Wisconsin local history organizations and information school graduate students to create new digital collections. In our session, program coordinators and participants will discuss how and why we designed this initiative, share a few success stories and lessons learned along the way, and offer ideas for structuring a similar digitization initiative within your community or organization.

Digitization is about more than imaging. It can also be about using human and machine-readable pathways and discovery systems to broaden access to the widest range of users. In the past, digitization of archival collections has focused on capturing and accessing images of hand-written material. In the current cultural heritage environment, providing access to images of archival textual material alone is not enough. Today’s archival collections need to be searchable and transcribable. This session will discuss how the University Libraries uses technology such as OCR and AI and also uses the public to explore and transcribe digitized texts. We will talk about how archives are crowdsourcing digitized transcripts with students, staff and the public.

If we want to use research to make meaningful change, we need to intentionally bring people into the creation of new knowledge. From our base in the University of Minnesota Libraries, Mapping Prejudice collaborates with community members to expose the history of structural racism by weaving together digital humanities tools and crowdsourcing technologies into a public history practice. We mobilize community members to identify and map racial covenants, clauses that were inserted into property deeds to keep people who were not White from buying or occupying homes. As we invite people into this process, we need to ensure we are not perpetuating harm or re-traumatizing the communities most impacted by the historical legacies we are unearthing.

To address this, we are developing an interdisciplinary crowdsourcing model, creating culturally sensitive community mapping sessions tailored to the needs of Black and Brown participants. Our team believes that the impact of data is determined by the way that it is created. For Mapping Prejudice to have a lasting impact, we are continuously refining our crowdsourcing process, ensuring our community engagement work centers the communities most impacted by the history of racial covenants and supports productive dialogue around racial inequities today. This presentation will share the ongoing learnings, challenges, questions, tips, and successes from this work.

Murphy Library at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse officially launched the Driftless River Initiative (DRI) in the spring of 2024 with the aim of utilizing digital collections in harnessing the collective informational impact of unique and rare library collections on the historical-, contemporary-, and future-research related to the Upper Mississippi River and the Driftless (unglaciated) Region of western Wisconsin. This exciting Initiative is rooted in the interdisciplinary approach to creating new knowledge through making information accessible and discoverable; preserving that information for future iterations of inquiry; and facilitating new connections between researchers, disciplines, and institutions to further enhance our knowledge and understanding of the natural environment, Wisconsin’s freshwater resources, and the mutual impact these unique geomorphic features and our presence have on each other. This compelling project is unique as it is built upon collections, some that have existed at Murphy Library for decades, that are seemingly distinct, yet all are connected through the Mississippi River and/or the unglaciated region of western Wisconsin; through employing a digital collections infrastructure, the project allows us to rethink collection building and how to enhance engagement with the materials, both digitally and physically. This presentation will discuss the circumstances leading up to launch of the DRI at Murphy Library, where the project currently stands, and what the hopes are for the project moving forward.