The Riley County Historical Museum is beginning to move some of its collections online.
Director Katharine Hensler said as technology evolves, museums typically tend to fall behind.
“We are so engulfed in preserving the past that we forget we have to appeal to those living in the future and with the tools and resources that are out there, technologically,” she said.
Hensler spoke Friday on Within Reason with Mike Matson on News Radio KMAN.
She said it will take some time to get the archives uploaded and cataloged, but that staff member and local filmmaker Hal Dace proposed using a platform called Collective Access as an affordable and efficient platform the museum could reliably utilize for its collection.
“Because we have over 90,000 objects, that’s a lot to edit,” Hensler said. “Before things get imported, we have to go through each record and make sure that there’s no spelling errors and that we have all the information correct. So we do have to manually edit this material.”
Hensler also said there are perks to having a digital database to display Riley County’s history.
“We can usually only exhibit maybe 2% to 5% at the max for public consumption versus what’s in our storage spaces,” she said. “This platform allows us to get a much larger percentage of our collection out in front of the community.”
Hensler said the goal this year is to upload as much as possible to the new platform.
“I would say we still only have a portion of our photographic collection and image collection that’s been digitized and uploaded,” she said. “I would love to say by the end of 2026 we’d have all the photographs and images up there.”
Within five years the museum hopes to have physical and three dimensional collections digitalized as well.
The digital archive is available to browse at rileychs.org.
