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.

What can be found in the WHO portal?

This expanding online search portal provides access to Wisconsin's history, culture, environment, government, and industry through a variety of digital collections harvested from cultural heritage institutions throughout the state. The diverse content includes photos, diaries, letters, maps, books, magazines, newspaper clippings, postcards, artworks, oral histories, museum artifacts, and much more. Over 55,000 digital resources are currently available through the WHO portal. See Collections for a full list.

Mission 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

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.

For detailed information on how your institution can become a Wisconsin Heritage Online Content Provider, visit the WHO resources wiki.

WHO Partners and Members

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. From June 2009-May 2011, major financial support has been provided by the Nicholas Family Foundation.

In addition to these core partners, approximately 50 institutions throughout the state are contributing members of the collaborative. A list of current WHO members is available from the WHO resources wiki.