As of July 2009, no new content will be added to the Wisconsin Heritage Online portal for at least one year. Over 45,000 records currently online remain searchable, and our Content Providers are continuing to digitize new material. Data harvesting and updates will resume when funding becomes available.
What is WHO?
The mission of Wisconsin Heritage Online (WHO) is to inspire education and discovery by making Wisconsin's cultural heritage available to a broad audience. This expanding online search portal provides access to our state's history, culture, environment, government, and economy through a variety of digital collections. Digital content comes from universities, museums, libraries, archives, and historical societies across the state, all strong partners in preserving and sharing Wisconsin heritage. Click on Content Providers for a list of WHO's digital collections.
What can be found in our Wisconsin Collections
The WHO portal is intended for students, teachers, genealogists, history buffs, and anyone who values our state and its wealth of resources. If it's a digital resource for Wisconsin's history and culture, you'll find it here. The diverse content includes photographs, artifacts, books, diaries, maps, audio files, and much more. The materials discovered through WHO might be used to write a research paper, refresh a syllabus, plan a visit to a museum or historic site, or discover your ancestors.
Nicholas Family Foundation Training and Outreach Grant
A generous grant from the Nicholas Family Foundation has enabled WHO to support an Outreach Specialist through May 2010. The Outreach Specialist works closely with local historical societies, libraries, and museums throughout the state to help them learn how to create quality digital collections and share their unique treasures online. To find out how your local history organization can participate, contact us at info@wisconsinheritage.org
New Online Exhibit Highlights WHO Collection
Discover colorful art pottery made in Edgerton, Wisconsin around the turn of the 20th century in the online exhibition Behind the Brush: The Women of the Pauline Pottery. This digital exhibit features objects from the collections of museums and historical societies throughout the state, all documented in the Wisconsin Decorative Arts Database, a Wisconsin Heritage Online collection hosted by the Wisconsin Historical Society and supported by the Chipstone Foundation. The exhibit was created to demonstrate Pachyderm, a web-based multimedia authoring tool developed by the New Media Consortium and available for use by WHO members.