We are thrilled to announce that Wisconsin Heritage Online was recently awarded a second operating grant from the Nicholas Family Foundation. This three-year funding commitment will enable us to continue our current outreach and training activities and also expand our efforts in education and promotion. In the coming months, we will be exploring possible future directions for the growth of the WHO program, so stay tuned for further updates. Many thanks to the Nicholas Family Foundation for their generous ongoing support!

We've started using Tumblr to highlight some of the diverse digital resources available through the WHO portal, focusing on a different historical theme each week to draw connections across time and place. Topics we've looked at so far include women in the workforce, deer hunting culture, and Wisconsin's grand hotels.

Check out the blog at wiscohisto.tumblr.com, add it to your RSS feed or subscribe by email.

Edgewood College has digitized twenty-two volumes of field notes from artist, environmentalist and ecologist Owen J. Gromme, widely regarded as the 20th century's John James Audubon. Born in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin in 1896, Gromme was an ardent protector of Wisconsin's natural resources throughout his life. Included in the collection, which spans eight decades of Gromme's career, are three volumes from the Cudahy-Massey Expedition of 1928-1929, the expedition that built the African natural history collections at the Field Museum in Chicago and the Milwaukee Public Museum. Gromme was a friend and colleague of Mark and Marian Lefebvre, who gifted the collection to Edgewood College in honor of the current and former directors of the Oscar Rennebohm Foundation.

Oshkosh Public Library partnered with Wisconsin photographer Michael Cooney to create the Pioneer Churches collection, which documents early church buildings still standing in Winnebago, Fond du Lac, Marquette, Calumet, and Waushara counties. In 2006, Cooney undertook a similar project to document barns in Winnebago County. His intention for both projects is to preserve buildings via photography by documenting these historic structures before they disappear. The Pioneer Churches collection will continue to grow as more churches in the region are located and photographed.

Wisconsin Heritage Online recently paid visits to the Grant County Historical Society in Lancaster and the Middleton Area Historical Society to help their volunteers start building digital collections. Both groups received 2011 mini-grants from the Wisconsin Council for Local History to purchase scanners and archival storage materials. The Middleton Area Historical Society is scanning and cataloging a broad range of historic photographs from the community. The Grant County Historical Society is also working with photographs depicting communities throughout the county, including the Pleasant Ridge settlement established in 1848 by former slaves. Both projects are ongoing, and the first images will available for online viewing in early 2012.

The Wisconsin Historical Records Advisory Board and the Wisconsin Historical Society have announced the winners of the Governor's Archives Awards for 2011. These awards, given annually since 2001, recognize outstanding work in preserving and providing access to Wisconsin's historical records. Two of the three awards conferred this year incorporate digital content: the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries' March on Milwaukee Civil Rights History Project and the Changing Landscapes of Wisconsin Project, developed by the University of Wisconsin-Madison Digital Collections Center and UW-Madison Department of Geography.

The March on Milwaukee digital collection is drawn from archival collections from the UWM Libraries and the Wisconsin Historical Society, including documents, photographs, news film footage, and oral history recordings and transcripts. These materials provide a window onto Milwaukee's civil rights history in the 1950s and 1960s, when community members waged protests, boycotts, and legislative battles against segregation and discriminatory practices in schools, housing, and social clubs. The Changing Landscapes of Wisconsin project expands access to a rare collection of more than 38,000 historic aerial photographs of Wisconsin's landscapes from 1937-1941. The photographs are made available to researchers using the Wisconsin Historic Aerial Image Finder, a tool created by the State Cartographer's Office that combines the historical images with modern mapping technology.

• CONTENTdm Basic Skills 1 (Getting Started) — January 18
• CONTENTdm Basic Skills 2 (Working with Text) — January 24
• CONTENTdm Basic Skills 3 (Maintaining Collections) — January 25

All sessions begin at 1 p.m. Central Time. To enroll or learn more, go to the OCLC Training Portal.

The UW-Madison School of Library and Information Studies is offering a new online continuing education course this spring: Digitization Projects for Libraries. This course is an overview of and introduction to the planning and management of digitization projects for libraries. The eight-week online course runs from January 30-March 23, 2012 and will be taught by Aaron Purcell, director of special collections at Virginia Tech. For more information or to register, see Digitization Projects for Libraries.