A New Partnership On Nov. 30, 2005, a partnership was entered into between the Mercer County Historical Society and the Archives and Special Collections unit at Western Illinois University at Macomb. The University’s digital photographic database has recently gone online, making available to the public over 2,700 fully cataloged images from the University's collection. Currently, most of those images are of places and people from McDonough County. However, WIU will soon be expanding the database's subject matter to include some five hundred photographs from Mercer County. In stages, WIU will borrow photographs from the Essley-Noble Museum and have them digitized on campus by professionals at its Visual Productions Service (VPS). This professional digitization provides significantly higher quality images than those that can be created with a desk top scanner. For the photos that are too large to readily transport, a photographer from VPS will come to the museum. The Mercer County images will be displayed online through the WIU site, with MCHS being credited as the source. A page at the beginning of the database will list contact information for MCHS and the Essley-Noble Museum and will provide a link to the Society's webpage. WIU will handle online requests for reproductions of photos, while staff at the Essley-Noble Museum will take care of walk-in requests. WIU will provide the museum with archival quality CD’s of the borrowed images. In addition, they will provide digital copies of the Dodson collection, which are Mercer County photographs housed at WIU and relating to Keithsburg. All work related to the digitization agreement between WIU and the Mercer County Historical Society is provided at no cost to the society. By contributing to WIU’s photo database, the Mercer County Historical Society will be greatly enhancing its visibility, as well as promoting interest in Mercer County worldwide. An added benefit is the security WIU will be providing for the museum's photo collection. At present, if anything were to happen to the museum, much of the county's visual history would be lost. Having the images housed in digital form at WIU insures that those images could be reproduced. The partnership between WIU and the Mercer County Historical Society is the first of many to be forged with libraries and historical societies within the Archives and Special Collection's sixteen-county collecting area. Although Mercer County’s images will not appear on the WIU database until later in 2006, you may explore WIU’s database at: https://www.wiu.edu/users/archives/digital/search.sphp MCHS’s own digitized images can still be viewed from the computer in the museum.