Some of you may have noticed that we have a new way to search our collections online – through a database called ArchivesSpace. The Nebraska State Historical Society staff has tagged collections by the names of people, places, and topics so you can browse in different ways and make new connections. ArchivesSpace catalogs all our archival collections and describes them so you know what we have. It inventories everything, including materials that have been digitized and those that are still “analog-only.”
We’ve also been working on another improvement – connecting ArchivesSpace to our digital preservation software, which is hosted in a system called Preservica. We’ve been using Preservica for several years now, so it may look familiar. It is great at storing our digital content, but it can be hard to know what records you might be missing as you browse, as only a small portion of our entire archives are digitized and in Preservica.
Connecting the two databases addresses that challenge. Now you can browse ArchivesSpace to get the big picture and see everything a collection has to offer, both digitized and not. You can quickly tell if something is digitized by the presence of a little photo icon next to the record’s title; clicking the big link button on the record’s page will take you directly to the digitized content. Another nice feature is browsing ArchivesSpace by “digital object”, which is all the digitized and born-digital content available in the system.
A collection that contains digital objects (aka digitized records that are available to view online). The little photo icon next to these folders indicates that something has been digitized.
So give it a go! Browse ArchivesSpace by collection or try searching for your favorite historical topic. Discover what we have in our collections (and easily tell if something is already digitized). If you have any questions, reach out to us at reference@hn.libanswers.com.
The link you will see on the ArchivesSpace page describing this folder – click this link to view the digitized content.
The link opens this page in Preservica. This is the digitized folder of military correspondence that we saw described in ArchivesSpace.
(Published October 2026)
