Since the 2017 relocation of most object and archival collections from the museum building downtown Madison to the State Archives Preservation Facility (SAPF) on the eastside of the city, staff have been working to create greater public access to the collections. One of the most approachable ways to improve public access has been to digitize the collections and make them available online through our website. In the past, the Wisconsin Veterans Museum received a grant through the Institute of Library and Museum Services, a federal agency that provides library grants, museum grants, policy development, and research, to digitize and make available Civil War images, primarily the portrait photography. The image digitization increased the use and usability of these images, making them globally available while limiting access and protecting the originals from potential damage.

With that success in mind, museum staff applied for and received a second grant through the Institute of Library and Museum Services (IMLS) to digitize and make available other images in our collection. While researching and developing the project, archives staff identified that images following the Civil War, including photographs taken during the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars, are increasingly vulnerable. Even when the images are stored correctly, they are prone to fading, losing clarity and details. Many images are also mounted on brittle substrates, which when damaged, can cause harm to the images.

In exploring our collections, archives staff realized that traditional digitization methods, namely scanning on a flatbed scanner, would not be enough alone to capture the images from this period. The staff would have to develop new processes to digitally preserve them. While many of the images from this period can be scanned on our traditional flatbed, other images present unique challenges. A large number of portraits, many of Civil War veterans later in their lives, are often re-touched with pastels, chalk and charcoal, which makes them vulnerable to being damaged if placed on our normal scanners. In addition, many of the images are mounted on canvas stretchers, while others have been placed on curved backings. Many of them are also too large for our flatbed scanner, and too delicate to be put on our motorized pull-through scanner.  We concluded that the best way to capture as many of these images as possible would be to photograph them.

Thanks to the work of two dedicated digitization specialists whose combined position is funded by the IMLS federal grant, we are one year into a three-year project. Hundreds of images have been uploaded, described, and published on the internet through our cataloging system. Next, our current digitization specialist will undertake the task of moving our delicate, oversized and vulnerable images into the photo studio at the SAPF and photograph them before re-boxing and returning them to climate-controlled storage for preservation.

"IMLS Grants Preserve Delicate Photographs, Improve Public Access" was written by Brittany Strobel, Processing Archivist and adapted for the web by Jennifer Stevenson, Marketing Manager at the Wisconsin Veterans Museum  The article first appeared in the Spring 2025 issue of The Bugle, a publication of the Wisconsin Veterans Museum Foundation.