Unleashing Collection Access: McLeod County History at your Fingertips

Sunday, October 19th -2-3 PM Museum Educational Media Center For the past eight years the McLeod County Historical Society's volunteers and staff have been working diligently towards the day when the Museum could unleash the huge store of Historical McLeod County information for use by the public. Well that day has now arrived! With over 50,000 historical records now securely logged in our inventory software program, we now have a great representation of the Museum's collections that is searchable by keyword. The Museum will be holding our Unleashing Collections program to help educate the public on how to access this information and what kind of historical content can be found. Currently we have two ways that parts of our collection can be accessed: One is through our Online Searchable Database, and the other is via two workstations that can be used by guests visiting our Historical Research Library. Our on-line database features over 6,000 photos from our Family Photo archival files. Although this is just a sampling of our vast photo collection, the Museum hopes to have 10,000 records available to browse on-line by this time next year. These photos can be purchased via our website gift shop or by mailing a check or money order to the museum. Our in-house searchable database gives you full access to the entire collection of artifacts, photos, documents and much more that is currently logged in our system. This includes donor information, photos or scans of many of the items, as well as historical context of how it relates to McLeod County History. We want to educate and encourage the public to use these new ways to access and learn about McLeod County History, so we hope you will join us to learn how to use this valuable new resource and have McLeod County History at your fingertips!