APTrust is pleased to announce that two new organizations will join its community of member institutions effective July 1: Recollection Wisconsin and the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming. Each brings distinct collections, expertise, and perspective to APTrust, and each represents a different kind of growth for the consortium.
Recollection Wisconsin: A First for APTrust's Membership
Recollection Wisconsin's arrival marks a notable milestone for APTrust: it is the first member organization outside higher education and a cultural heritage network of public libraries, archives, and museums to join the consortium.
Hosted by Wisconsin Library Services (WiLS) and governed in partnership with the Wisconsin Public Library Consortium (WPLC), Recollection Wisconsin connects cultural heritage institutions across the state, including public libraries, historical societies, and museums, with a mission to preserve, promote, and provide digital access to Wisconsin's history through collaboration and shared infrastructure. That mission, built on collaboration, stewardship, transparency, and support for institutions of all sizes, aligns closely with APTrust's own approach to collaborative digital preservation.
Recollection Wisconsin's path to APTrust grew out of direct experience with the limits of a homegrown approach. WPLC, in partnership with WiLS and Recollection Wisconsin, had explored and piloted an in-state preservation solution, an effort that revealed a familiar gap: storage capacity alone is not the same as the sustained technical infrastructure that true digital preservation requires, particularly around fixity monitoring, redundancy, audits, and long-term stewardship at scale. APTrust was selected because it offers a mature, standards-based preservation environment with dedicated expertise, freeing Recollection Wisconsin to focus on coordination, policy development, and service delivery for its member organizations.
Recollection Wisconsin will begin with approximately 30 TB of cultural heritage materials, primarily TIFFs, JPGs, and PDFs, along with some audiovisual content, drawn from public libraries, historical societies, and museums throughout Wisconsin. APTrust is expected to serve as a foundational component of Recollection Wisconsin's emerging preservation strategy, informing the development of workflows, policies, and service models as the program matures and grows.
American Heritage Center: A Major Special Collections Archive Joins APTrust
The American Heritage Center (AHC) at the University of Wyoming will also join APTrust as of July 1. As one of the largest public archives in the American West, the AHC collects broadly across Wyoming and western history; the national entertainment industry and popular culture; economic geology; journalism; transportation; as well as natural resources and conservation, ecology, and biodiversity. It also serves as the University of Wyoming's institutional archive.
The AHC's digital preservation strategy was established more than a decade ago and has not been substantially revised even as its holdings have grown considerably. Joining APTrust addresses two needs at once: practical relief from the cost pressures of a large and rapidly growing deposit volume, and strategic guidance for building a more sustainable, scalable preservation framework going forward. Paul Flesher, Director at the AHC, has also expressed particular interest in drawing on APTrust's community to help contextualize emerging challenges, including the implications of AI for archival practice, within a broader and more experienced preservation network.
With an anticipated deposit volume of 50 to 100 TB spanning institutional records, cultural heritage materials, audiovisual content, and scientific data, the AHC has the potential to be among APTrust's larger depositors. Its breadth of holdings positions it as a valuable contributor to working groups focused on diverse formats and preservation workflows.
Looking Ahead
Both Recollection Wisconsin and the American Heritage Center have indicated a strong interest in active community participation: sharing expertise, joining interest and working groups, and attending member meetings. That kind of engagement is exactly what makes the APTrust community work. Members do not just deposit content; they shape the practices, policies, and shared knowledge that benefit everyone in the consortium.
APTrust looks forward to supporting both organizations as they build and strengthen their digital preservation programs, and to learning from the perspective each brings, whether that is Recollection Wisconsin's experience coordinating preservation across a statewide network of libraries and cultural heritage organizations, or the American Heritage Center's depth of experience stewarding a uniquely broad and significant collection. Welcome to APTrust.