This week, August 4 through 8, SHSMO is hosting a giving campaign in support of its digitized and “born digital” collections. The State Historical Society of Missouri’s growing digital collections include digitized photographs, art, maps, diaries, letters, books, and oral histories as well as SHSMO’s born digital repository which contains collections that were received in a digital format.
“SHSMO has digitized over 70,000 photographs, over 15,000 editorial cartoons, thousands of WWII letters and Civil War diaries, and over 3,500 images from some of Missouri’s well-known artists,” said senior archivist Heather Richmond.
SHSMO is collecting and sharing newer media, too. In the last 15 years, many SHSMO collections consist of materials arriving entirely via hard drives and flash drives that must be transferred to our digital preservation system before that history disappears.
Donations to the campaign will help SHSMO purchase scanners, which allow us to get more items online more quickly and expand our digital storage capacity—digital materials require a lot of space!
Follow SHSMO’s behind-the-scenes videos on Facebook and Instagram to learn more about digitization. To donate, go to SHSMO.org/donate/digitization.