Editor’s Note: This is one of a series of profiles of the Wisconsin Idea in action. See past profiles we have published.

A 15-year-old home-schooled boy … college students in Illinois … the nephew of Bangladesh’s president.

The people on this list have a common trait: They are all Wisconsin Idea recipients, thanks to the University of Wisconsin Digital Collections Center (UWDCC). In the mid- to late-1990s, the university’s digital collections began on a small scale. Initially, librarians were digitizing an assortment of collections for specific, targeted audiences.

“Digital libraries were a very new idea,” says Peter Gorman, head of UWDCC. “At that time everybody who was doing this kind of work was doing it very much on a project-by-project basis — ‘Let’s take this book or this group of images and put it on the Web.’”

Today, however, is a different story. Now the UWDCC is thinking big, satisfying the needs of a remarkably wide array of users who are accessing large but well-defined sets of content. These “umbrella projects,” such as the State of Wisconsin Collection and Ecology and Natural Resources, became necessary to provide the organization that keeps users from drowning in the UW System’s ocean of digital material.

As head of the University of Wisconsin Digital Collections Center, Peter Gorman usually oversees 30 to 50 projects at a time. But he tries to find time to browse the full collection, which now offers more than 50,000 images and 1.3 million pages of text.

“We’ve gone from early exploration through high-impact projects to growing large collections,” Gorman says. “It’s a maturing that’s happened throughout the digital-library world.”

During the maturation process of the UWDCC, which officially was founded in 2000 as a systemwide initiative, the librarians have distinguished themselves in the world of digital libraries through their steady commitment to the Wisconsin Idea, the concept that the work done at the university level provides benefits for the state and beyond.

In fact, one of the first online collections, the Wisconsin Electronic Reader — a compilation of mostly firsthand accounts from important events in the state’s history that was completed in 1998 in conjunction with the Wisconsin sesquicentennial — is still heavily used today by schools around the state.

Gorman is often surprised at the diverse populations, both in the state and beyond, that use the collections.

“That’s one of the greatest satisfactions of the job: to see uses of the material that we never dreamed of or to see that some fairly obscure things are finding audiences that we didn’t know were out there,” he says. Among the audiences are:

• the 15-year-old home-schooled Wisconsin student who used a UWDCC project — developed in conjunction with the University of Iceland to aid UW–Madison’s Scandinavian studies department — to teach himself Icelandic;
• university classrooms in Illinois that are using the online text and audio of a UW–Madison professor’s modern translations of “Beowulf”;
• Shanawaz Kha, the nephew of Iajuddin Ahmed, a UW–Madison alumnus and current president of Bangladesh, who found his uncle’s picture while searching the collections.

“It’s great to see that even things that we think of primarily as local resources are truly global resources,” Gorman says. “Certainly we hoped that use of the digital collections would grow. It’s very gratifying to see those hopes fulfilled so dramatically.”

Gorman himself likes to contribute to the increased use of the collections. Since his responsibilities as head of the UWDCC keep him busy overseeing 30–50 projects in production at a given time, he is usually unable to delve into a new collection until after it is completed. However, he likes to spend time just browsing the more than 50,000 images and 1.3 million pages of text to stay familiar with projects and, he hopes, learn something new. One of his recent discoveries is the striking similarity between stained microscopic images from a botany collection and a collection of images from books’ marbled endpapers. “The kind of interdisciplinary work that you can do in the online environment is really exciting,” Gorman says. “Things that are physically separated in the analog world we can bring together. People can discover relationships in a variety of content.”

“The kind of interdisciplinary work that you can do in the online environment is really exciting. …People can discover relationships in a variety of content,” says Peter Gorman, head of the University of Wisconsin Digital Collections Center.

A favored collection of Gorman’s is the Wisconsin Folksong Collection, where he listens to field recordings from the 1930s and 1940s to give him ideas for songs for his old-time music band, Slippery Lick, in which he blends Scotch-Irish melodies and African-American rhythms and plays fiddle, guitar and mandolin. In this way, Gorman himself is proving to be another unusual audience for the online collections.

“Something that is of research value to someone may be of recreational value to somebody else,” Gorman says. “My interests involve listening to polkas or some of the field recordings to get ideas for tunes to learn to play. For someone else, it’s a valuable ethnographic collection for research.”

Much like musical tastes, digital collections are in a state of continual evolution. Gorman says that while he cannot predict the future of online collections, he believes the biggest continuing challenge will revolve around how to get more content available to users more easily. Gorman thinks libraries are up to the task.

“It’s a great time to be a librarian,” Gorman says. “As a service organization, we’ve been able to adapt very readily to the information age. It’s a very natural transformation of what libraries have always been about: providing access to materials, helping users find materials, and taking care of the research and instructional needs of the university, and by extension, the state. I think libraries are more relevant than ever in the information age.”