About Wisconsin Heritage Online (WHO)

About Wisconsin Heritage Online
Wisconsin Heritage Online (WHO) is a collaborative digitization program dedicated to making Wisconsin's cultural heritage resources available to a broad audience of students, teachers, scholars, genealogists, history buffs, and anyone who values our state and its wealth of resources. A statewide network of Content Providers including academic libraries, public libraries, archives, museums, and historical societies work with WHO to share their photographs, artifacts, manuscripts, books, articles, and sound recordings in digital form. The WHO program was developed in 2005 as a collaboration of Wisconsin Library Services, the Milwaukee Public Library, the Milwaukee Public Museum, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Wisconsin Historical Society, and the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction's Division for Libraries, Technology and Community Learning.

Missions and Goals
The mission of Wisconsin Heritage Online is to inspire education and discovery by making Wisconsin's cultural heritage available to the public via the World Wide Web.

The goals of the program are to:

• Expand access to content digitized by Wisconsin's cultural heritage institutions.

• Encourage and facilitate digitization through availability of support, training, and hosting services.

• Maintain the infrastructure to support digital collaboration.

• Provide for content to be accessible from one place.

• Assure that content is adequately indexed.

• Develop and maintain shared standards for metadata.

Participating in WHO
Membership in Wisconsin Heritage Online is open to all Wisconsin cultural heritage institutions, including libraries, archives, museums, historical societies, and other organizations with content to share. Annual membership dues are $50 for small organizations and $100 for large organizations or consortia.

Contact: Emily Pfotenhauer, WHO Outreach Specialist, 608 265-2138, epfotenhauer at wils.wisc.edu

Collaborative partners and founding members of Wisconsin Heritage Online provide infrastructure and other supporting services.