On March 1, 1838, the Madison school district consisted of 10 or 15 students taught by Miss Louisa M. Brayton in a log cabin for one dollar per week. By 1885, the District had grown to nearly 2,000 students taught by 38 teachers. The teachers' total annual payroll was $17,902.57 ($471.12 average annual wage).

How do we know about Miss Brayton and the early years of the Madison School District? We know about them because Reuben G. Thwaites Historical Sketch of the Public Schools of Madison, Wisconsin. 1838-1885 was published in 1886 as part of the District's 1885 Annual Report. Thwaites' early history of Madison schools was forgotten and nearly inaccessible just few short months ago.

Now, anyone in the world can view and read about the history of the Madison Schools by going to http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/WI.MMSD.

The link provides district annual reports and publications dating from 1880 through the early 1970's. The increased accessibility to these reports and publications is largely a function of a cooperative effort between the Madison School & Community Education Library (MSCEL), the UW School of Education and the University of Wisconsin Digital Collections Center (UWDCC).

In the summer of 2001, the University of Wisconsin formed the University of Wisconsin Digital Collections Center (UWDCC) and began the process of digitizing materials of local historical interest. The UWDCC collections come from a wide variety of soucres and are found in a variety of formats including, books, reports, photographs, audio and video.

Shortly after the University began digitizing collections, we realized that the archive of district publications stored in the Madison School & Community Education Library (MSCEL) was beginning to physically deteriorate. We knew we needed to find a way to preserve the materials, or risk losing them entirely. Discussions with JoAnn Carr, Director of the Center for Instructional Materials & Computing, and Vicki Tobias and Mellissa McLimans, of the UWDCC staff suggested that a cooperative project with the UWDCC might be possible. The UWDCC's decision to include our records in their State of Wisconsin Digital Collection Project allowed us to increase the public accessibility of our district records while preserving them at the same time.

The actual scanning and tagging of the Madison school reports and publications took the UWDCC staff approximately 12 months.

The Madison Metropolitan School District collection currently consists of about 17,515 pages in 131 volumes. Anyone interested in the history of the district can find the materials at: http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/WI.MMSD. Visitors will find that like Thwaites' history of the school district, much of the most interesting information is buried within the annual reports. In all probability the Madison school district collection will continue to grow in the near future, as additional materials dating from the 1850s have recently been found.

A UW — Digital Collections Center worker scans a new addition for the Madison Metropolitan School District Collection

A UW — Digital Collections Center worker uses meta tags to describe a digitized report from the Madison Metropolitan School District Collection