I am passing this along with Michael's permission. Great things are
happening in Madiison!
Please see the message below.
Paula
Waupaca County Coordinator
WIGenWeb Project
http://www.rootsweb.com/~wiwaupac/index.htm
The following information has been received from Michael Edmonds, Deputy
Director, Library-Archives Division, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison,
Wisconsin regarding upcoming projects at the State Historical Society
Archives. Please note that the last four (4) items are tentative and many
months from completion, but just knowing that there is a plan to add more
resources online is so exciting!
Reminder: Check
http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/ often for news about the
Historical Society; that page changes several times a week. To see the
Society's online research resources together in a single place, go over to
http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/research.asp
"1. Right now, we're putting the final touches on a massive vital records
index that will please genealogists
(
http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/vitalrecords). Only births are there at the
moment, but deaths will go up today or tomorrow and marriages in a few
weeks.
2. By summer we hope to finish mounting all of our photos of small Wisconsin
towns at
http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/whi; there are 7,000 of them, and
about two-thirds have been added in the last 18 months.
3. We're just beginning to digitize every page of Wisconsin Historical
Collections and the Wisconsin Magazine of History. Late last fall we
received a grant from the Schoenleber Foundation of Milwaukee, that will
fund the work. We've scanned about 4,000 pages so far, and have 29,000 more
to go. Then we have to figure out how to mount them in a way that's useful
to researchers. My current estimate is that we will have every page
available, searchable by subject matter or by keyword.
4. We may have early Wisconsin newspapers (1833-1860) available next month
if our partners comes through as expected.
Beyond that, we will probably undertake the following projects during 2007:
5-6. More than a million pages of Wisconsin newspapers and about 150 county
histories will be converted to digital form later this year, but figuring
out how to present them on the Web and doing that work will probably take us
at least another 12 months.
7. We're also applying for a grant to make the core maps of Wisconsin
available.
8. Another grant would mount 160 hours of interviews with survivors of the
Nazi Holocaust who settled in Wisconsin.
These last 4 projects will surely not go public until well into 2007,
assuming we can raise the money to build them at all."