We're on the front page!

We love it when the local media notices something good about us!

Today's Sheboygan Press (Jan. 22, 2007) features a front page story about the library's digitization grant. This follows on the heels of another story on the same subject in a recent edition of the Tri-County News. We're thrilled by the exposure, especially because this is such an exciting project.

We'll be digitizing 600 historic images from the Edwin J. Majkrzak Historical Research Center and, thanks to a $3,000 grant from the U.S. government, we'll get to publish them onto a prestigious website hosted by the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The fine folks at UW-Madison's Digital Collection Center will be helping us every step of the way between now and next August, when our photos will actually be published.

We're honored to join the several other Wisconsin communities who already have portions of their local history on this site. And we're especially honored to be able to share some of the amazing photographs in our Heritage Collection, most of which were donated by Kiel historian Ed Majkrzak.

If you haven't had a chance to see the archives in the library's local history collection, please do stop in and ask us to show you around. People stop and peruse these items on a daily basis. Some make copies of family histories for their own genealogy project. Some collect information from our original documents for school projects. Others just like to go through the 80+ notebooks to satisfy their own curiosity. Whatever the reason, we're glad to be able to provide public access to so many pages of text and images. Together, they tell Kiel's story, and what a fascinating story it is!

If you can't make it into the library, well, that's what the digitization project is all about. By next fall - if you have Internet access - you'll be able to enjoy a large portion of our collection 24/7, right from the comfort of your own home.

Digitization uses cutting edge technology and is increasingly used by libraries all over the world. And Kiel is right at the forefront of the fray. Imagine that.

Guess we really are the little city that does big things.