Digitization Grant

The Appleton Library’s commitment to local history and its preservation was reaffirmed in late 2004 when the Library received a Library Services and Technology grant through the Department of Public Instruction to digitize historical plat books of the area and make them available to genealogists and researchers online. The atlases and plat books selected for this project are the 1889 and 1917 Outagamie County Atlas and Plat Books, a 1942 Plat map of Outagamie County and an undated Outagamie County Plat Book. Over many years of use, these titles have become too fragile to permit handling by library users. By digitizing them they shall again become accessible to everyone. In addition, Reference staff will produce an index to the names in each of these plat books. The name index will facilitate finding the location of land owned by a particular individual.

The digitization will take place at the Wisconsin Digital Collections Center in Madison this year. The University of Wisconsin Digital Collections’ goal is to provide access to Wisconsin’s rare and/or fragile items of broad research value and other items that are of value to students, scholars and the general public. When the project is completed later this year, the digitized plat books and the index will be found on the Appleton Library website and also become part of the University of Wisconsin Digital Collections site.

Links to local history sites:

Appleton Library Local History page
http://www.apl.org/history/

Fox Valley Memory
http://www.foxvalleymemory.org/

University of Wisconsin Digital Collections
http://uwdc.library.wisc.edu/collections.html