Campus Connection

Murphy Library materials now in Digital Public Library of America 

UWL's Murphy Library is joining libraries across the country in providing free, online access to its digital collections. The library has coordinated with Recollection Wisconsin to have materials available through the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). More than 6,000 items from Murphy Library's Digital Collections are now more accessible worldwide. The materials include unique and hard-to-find books, manuscripts, photographs, maps, academic publications, and other La Crosse and UWL related materials. Murphy Library Digital Collections Librarian David Mindel is excited about the additional exposure. “We couldn’t be happier for UWL and Murphy Library to be part of such a well-developed national digital platform allowing us to reach an even larger audience and to bring local history resources to researchers and anyone with interest in the La Crosse area,” says Mindel. The DPLA’s mission is to bring together the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and making them freely available to the world. It is a one-stop-shop for accessing nearly 16 million digitized items from contributing institutions, and it provides innovative ways to search, browse, and interact through use of its timeline, map, format and subject features. The content from Murphy Library includes a wide variety of items of historical and cultural significance from Murphy Library Special Collections. The items include:

• historical images of Cuban refugees who came to Fort McCoy in the 1980s’ era Freedom Flotilla
• historical maps
• an astounding collection of an ornithologist’s local field notes
• historical newspapers, including “The Wisconsin Labor Advocate” and the LGBT newsletter “Leaping La Crosse”

UWL alumni will find many items of interest including the complete run of the UWL student newspaper, “The Racquet”; all issues of the UWL alumni magazine known as “The Alumnus” and later “The Lantern”; student handbooks going back to 1921; and more. In addition to the new exposure through the DPLA, Murphy Library Digital Collections are available through the Murphy Library website, including a regularly-changing featured item on the library home page. The collections are housed on a UWL server and use the locally-created software ResCarta, which is specifically designed to provide long-term preservation and complete access to historical digital collections. Users can browse through the collections in several ways, search using a variety of filters, apply different viewing options, read transcribed text, view descriptions and other metadata about each item, print, and much more. The collections are freely available to all through:

• Murphy Library Digital Collections website
• Recollection Wisconsin
• Digital Public Library of America