Thank you to everyone who has donated to our Digitization Giving Campaign! Your gift helps us grow our digital collections that can be accessed worldwide.
See More of What You Love on Our Website
The State Historical Society of Missouri’s digital collections feature digitized photographs, art, maps, diaries, letters, books, and oral histories, along with a born-digital repository of materials received in digital formats.
Since the 2000s, SHSMO has digitized over 70,000 photographs, over 15,000 editorial cartoons, thousands of WWII letters and Civil War diaries, and images from some of Missouri’s well-known artists. Did you know the process to digitize the photos that go onto our website takes 10 to 15 minutes on average per photo? This includes scanning, processing metadata, transcribing handwritten elements, and uploading them into our online software. This takes even longer for handwritten letters and diaries.
SHSMO is collecting and sharing newer media too! In the last 10 to 15 years, many acquired materials have been born digital, and some newer SHSMO collections consist of materials arriving entirely via hard drives and flash drives. History is quickly disappearing when it comes to these born digital materials as some of the original media where content was created and housed is becoming obsolete—think computer discs, data cartridges, floppy disks—so SHSMO is working to get these materials into our digital preservation system before they disappear.
How You Can Help
With your help, SHSMO can make more digital materials freely available online and accessible anywhere in the world. Your donation will grow our digital collections by helping SHSMO to:
- Purchase scanners which will help us get more items online more quickly.
- Expand our digital storage capacity: digital materials require a lot of space!
- Acquire external drives that allow us to access and read material that people saved to floppy or zip disks. Remember those?
- Purchase write blockers that make sure no data is altered or damaged on original hard drives before transferring the data to our digital preservation system for long-term storage and public use.
Thank you for joining our giving campaign and helping SHSMO expand access to digital materials for students, educators, genealogists, journalists, historians, researchers, and more!
"History is disappearing faster now than ever before, and we are capturing it now for future generations.” ~Elizabeth Engel, Senior Archivist