Back in January 2016 the State Library and the
Kansas Historical Society started a partnership in providing better access to older Kansas state government publications that has since blossomed into a bountiful harvest of electronic documents now available to the public at the KGI Online Library.
Once every couple weeks staff from the State Library drive over to the Kansas Historical Society and borrow boxes of duplicate state publications from the Society. SLK staff then take the boxes back to the State Library where we scan publications from the boxes, catalog them and add them to the KGI Online Library. The boxes are repacked and returned to KHS and more boxes are picked up to be scanned/digitized. Staff at the State Library create catalog records with links to the newly added publications and share those catalog records with the Historical Society for their catalog,
ATLAS.
This is a win-win project with researchers wanting information on Kansas coming out the biggest winners of all. Electronic copies of these publications are a secondary means of preserving them in another format while offering them up for public view. Access is provided via catalog records on the State Library's catalog, the Topeka online ATLAS catalog, the international
WorldCat catalog as well as through the
KGI website and Internet search engines like
Google and
Yahoo.
There is a lot of legwork involved in this project. Vicky Wolf, Jason Ackermann, Rita Troxel, Trista Phillipi and Bill Sowers are involved with the project here at the State Library. We also want to send shout outs to Margaret Knecht and Josh Haney at the Kansas Historical Society. They get the boxes out for us and help us in going through them on site before we transport them to the State Library. Josh does a heck of a lot of heavy lifting and deserves special mention. Margaret is a wealth of knowledge on Kansas history and helps us discern those items of greater importance.
It is through cooperative projects such as this that archives, libraries and other institutions will move ahead into the 21st century continuing to serve the public good. Our thanks to the Kansas Historical Society for their important role in helping to make the Kansas Government Information (KGI) Online Library a great resource for Kansas state government publications.