The conventional story of digital preservation puts large research libraries at the center. They have the collections, the staff, the institutional repositories built up over decades. It follows, in this telling, that preservation practice trickles down from research universities to everyone else.
Recollection Wisconsin complicates that story.
A different kind of member
Recollection Wisconsin joined APTrust as its first member from outside higher education, and the distinction matters beyond a membership category. Recollection Wisconsin is Wisconsin's statewide cultural heritage aggregator, bringing together digital collections from libraries, museums, historical societies, and archives across the state. It also serves as the state’s DPLA (Digital Public Library of America) service hub. It is run by WiLS, a library services organization that broadly supports Wisconsin libraries and cultural heritage organizations. The decision to pursue preservation, and the commitment to fund it, came from the WPLC (Wisconsin Public Library Consortium); Recollection Wisconsin is administering the resulting service on the consortium's behalf.
That structure puts Recollection Wisconsin in an unusual position relative to most hubs. Not every state hub does what Recollection Wisconsin does. Many hubs focus exclusively on aggregation: collecting metadata and pointers to digital content so it can be discovered through a statewide platform and DPLA, without taking on responsibility for the long-term preservation of the underlying files. Recollection Wisconsin, through its partnership with APTrust, has extended its service to include preservation, giving contributing institutions across Wisconsin, many of which are small historical societies, public libraries, and cultural heritage organizations without dedicated digital preservation programs, access to preservation infrastructure they could not build or staff on their own.
The path here was not a green-field decision. Wisconsin public library systems, through the Wisconsin Public Library Consortium (WPLC), had been managing their own shared backup arrangement for digital collections for several years, an informal, self-hosted solution that served its purpose but eventually ran into familiar limits: end-of-life hardware, a submission process that proved difficult for smaller contributors, and infrastructure that was not built for long-term sustainability. That trajectory, starting with a do-it-yourself approach and outgrowing it, is one many statewide and regional consortia will recognize, and it is part of what makes the eventual move to a managed, standards-based preservation service a useful case study rather than an isolated example. WPLC is funding the new APTrust-based service, with Recollection Wisconsin serving as project administrator, managing the technical implementation and day-to-day relationship with contributing institutions.
Why the small-institution model works
Large research libraries often carry decades of legacy systems, established workflows, and internal politics that slow change, even when the will to change is there. Smaller organizations and statewide consortia carry less of that weight. A few structural advantages stand out:
Fewer competing systems. A single-purpose statewide hub does not have to reconcile preservation practice with a dozen other enterprise systems built for other purposes. There is less to unwind.
Shorter distance between decision and action. In a large research library, adding a preservation service might require sign-off across multiple departments and budget cycles. In an organization like WiLS, running Recollection Wisconsin as one of several coordinated services, the path from identifying a need to acting on it is often much shorter.
Necessity-driven efficiency. Smaller organizations and consortia rarely have the luxury of building custom infrastructure. That constraint pushes toward practical, shared solutions rather than elaborate in-house systems, which is precisely the model community preservation infrastructure like APTrust is built to support.
A consortial model built for exactly this gap. Recollection Wisconsin was already positioned to distribute a shared benefit across many institutions. Extending that model to preservation is a natural fit, not a stretch. It is the same value proposition, applied to a different problem.
Existing training relationships, extended rather than rebuilt. Recollection Wisconsin already runs a Digital Readiness Community of Practice for contributing institutions. Rather than standing up a separate preservation education effort from scratch, the plan is to fold preservation guidance into the existing relationship, reaching institutions through channels they already trust and use. Other hubs with established digitization or metadata training programs have the same opportunity: preservation education does not have to be a new relationship; it can be an extension of one that already works.
A replicable pattern
The more interesting question is not what Recollection Wisconsin has done, but what it makes possible for other cultural heritage hubs. Every state has some version of this landscape: dozens or hundreds of small cultural heritage organizations with valuable digital collections and no realistic path to building preservation infrastructure on their own. Some hubs are already positioned, structurally and organizationally, to do what WiLS has done: add preservation as a service layered on top of aggregation, rather than treating the two as separate problems solved by separate organizations.
That is not automatic. Not every hub has an organization like WiLS behind it, with the staff capacity and institutional mandate to take on a new service line. But where that capacity exists, the Recollection Wisconsin model offers a template: partner with a shared preservation repository, extend an existing trusted relationship with contributing institutions, and make preservation available to organizations that would otherwise go without it.
Wisconsin is not the first state to take this approach. Centralized, hub-based models supporting statewide digital preservation already operate or are forming in states including Indiana, Michigan, and Alabama, each organized somewhat differently but sharing the same underlying premise: preservation infrastructure is more sustainable when built once and shared broadly than when each contributing institution attempts to solve the problem alone. Recollection Wisconsin's approach adds another working example to that growing list, and one specifically rooted in the cultural heritage hub structure rather than a standalone preservation consortium.
“For a lot of the institutions we work with, preservation has always felt out of reach, something they knew they should be doing but didn't have the staff or infrastructure to take on. Partnering with APTrust let us extend that capacity to them without asking them to build new systems themselves, which is really the same thing Recollection Wisconsin has always tried to do with aggregation.”
Kristen Whitson, Digital Specialist and Consortia Manager, WiLS & Recollection Wisconsin
What the field can learn
It is worth turning the lens back on larger institutions here. The instinct to build comprehensive, self-contained systems is understandable, but it is not the only path and is not always the most sustainable. Shared infrastructure and consortial models are not consolation prizes for organizations that cannot afford to go it alone. They are, in many cases, a more resilient and more efficient way to solve a problem that every institution, large or small, ultimately shares.
Recollection Wisconsin did not build a smaller version of what a large research library might build. It built a model suited to its own structure, its own relationships, and the needs of the institutions it already served. Other DPLA hubs weighing whether and how to take on preservation have a working example to look to, not a hypothetical one.
APTrust welcomes conversations with other cultural heritage aggregators, DPLA service hubs, and statewide digital collection initiatives interested in exploring preservation partnerships. Learn More.