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Feature Stories |
By Shannon Kupfer, Digital and Tangible Media Cataloger, State Library of Ohio
On March 2, 2009, the State Library of Ohio and the Ohio Historical Society launched the next generation of Ohio Memory after nearly a year of planning and effort by staff from both organizations. Ohio Memory contains 75,000 images contributed by 330 libraries, archives, museums, and historical societies, and documents Ohio’s past from prehistory to present.
The first generation of Ohio Memory was created in 2000 by staff from the Ohio Historical Society with funds from the Ohio Public Library Information Network (OPLIN), the Ohio Bicentennial Commission, and an Institute of Museum and Library Services LSTA grant awarded by the State Library of Ohio. Ohio Memory resided in a digital repository housed by OhioLINK and included digitized content from cultural heritage institutions around the state.
In 2008, staff members from both the Ohio Historical Society and the State Library of Ohio began discussing the possibility of working together to build a new version of Ohio Memory. Such collaboration would involve sharing the cost of OCLC’s CONTENTdm, the content-management system used by both institutions. The joint effort would not only save money for both institutions, but would allow for the participation of cultural-heritage institutions statewide. The goal: to create an extremely strong Web presence for Ohio’s extraordinary collections and the institutions in which those collections reside by collecting digital images of Ohio’s treasures and storing them in one location. “People are used to one-stop shopping and retrieval of information. The new website allows users to find documents, portraits, and photographs on any given subject quickly and easily,” said State Librarian Jo Budler. “It is wonderful that our partnership with the Ohio Historical Society allowed us to move our collections to a new and improved platform.”
Since going live with the second generation Ohio Memory in March, the Ohio Historical Society and the State Library of Ohio have added multiple digital collections containing thousands of images, documents, sound files, and more. Several libraries and historical societies have contributed digital content and others are interested in doing so. There is no question that, thus far, the new Ohio Memory is all that we hoped it would be.
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