In March 2020, the Lyon County Historical Society received a Minnesota Historical and Cultural Heritage Grant, also known as a Legacy Grant for $9,500 for CollectiveAccess Data Conversion. The project, which consisted of data conversion from the former system Past Perfect to CollectiveAccess, setup on the public site, training, and data cleanup, was completed in the summer of 2020.

CollectiveAccess is an online, open source-based collections management software system available through the Minnesota Alliance of Local History Museums (MALHM). Organizations using the CollectiveAccess system have the opportunity to share as much or as little of their collection online as they wish. The benefit of sharing the collection online is that it becomes more accessible to researchers and the public. Currently, there are 45 organizations from across the state using CollectiveAccess for their collections management.

LCHS currently has over 26,000 items from the museum collection cataloged on the system. As of now, we have shared over 10,000 objects on the public website. To view our shared collection online, visit www.mncollections.org and click on the Lyon County Historical Society. You can search the collection by typing in keywords such as a business name, town in Lyon County, school, person, sport, etc.

If you are searching for something that does not show up, feel free to reach out to us via email or phone. We have many items in our collection that are not yet accessible online or cataloged, but we can check to see if we have it in our collection. If you have objects, photographs, documents, etc. pertaining to Lyon County history that you would like to donate to LCHS, please feel free to reach out to us to see if we can accept it for the collection.

The photograph featured this week shows an item from our collection. The object ID number is 2023.18.08. This system of numbers is applied to items donated to LCHS. For this object id number, the 2023 is the year the item was donated, the 18 is the assigned number to the donor, and the 8 refers to this being the 8th item in this collection donated. For this object id number, nine copies of the “Scholar’s Echo” were donated. The “Scholar’s Echo” was a newsletter published by Russell High School. The newsletter cover featured this week was published on March 8, 1945. The cover is highlighting that March is Red Cross Month. The newsletters were donated by Keith and Margaret Moat in 2023.