MHS Digital Projects

People often say that Montana is a small town with a long Main Street. Both parts of that statement ring true to me. Here at the Montana Historical Society, we're proud to serve people who live in every corner of Montana, and work hard to maintain our connections across vast distances. (One way we're doing that this April is with our on-the-road educator workshops, which will be held in Lewistown, Glasgow, Chinook, and Cut Bank. There's still time to register!)

But the fact is, it is still a long haul from Libby to Cut Bank (the closest April workshop site) and we can't physically be everywhere. To overcome the prodigious length of Main Street, he Montana Historical Society has been working to use the internet to help serve our state. We broadcast all of our Thursday night programs through our YouTube channel, we record most of our annual history conference sessions to post on SoundCloud, and reach out through social media (including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest.)

We've also increased our commitment to digitizing collections and creating self-contained digital projects focusing on specific topics. I've talked individually about many of these digital initiatives before, but here's a quick run-down of my favorites:

• Montana's African American Heritage Resources, a gateway for exploring this understudies aspect of Montana history; 
• Digitized Montana Newspapers Online, a portal to access two, freely accessible resources that offer almost 700,000 full-text pages from over 125 newspapers; 
• Montana Place Names, a zoomable map to learn the origins of Montana place names, from Alzada to Zortman;
• Virtual Tours of the Capitol or the Original Governor's Mansion; 
• Montana Historical Society Museum Collections Online, where you can explore selected objects and artwork held in trust by the Montana Historical Society, including the Charles M. Russell Collection.
• Women's History Matters, created as part of a commemoration of the hundredth anniversary of women’s suffrage in Montana; 
• The Montana Memory Project, an online source for digital collections relating to Montana's cultural heritage. (See links to the Montana Historical Society's contributions here.) 
• ExploreBig: Montana's Historic Places, a website and mobile app to help you discover Montana’s rich cultural resources.

To make it easier to access and explore these digital projects, I've created a new link on the Educator Resources Page of our website that will lead to a list of our Digital Projects. I'll add more links as we complete more projects so check back often. We have some great new ones in the works.