Quick Summary
The Minnesota Digital Library will be celebrating its 20th anniversary in 2025. In honor of that milestone, MDL has a goal to add a contributing organization from each of Minnesota’s 87 counties. We are only missing eighteen counties!
In 2025, the Minnesota Digital Library (MDL) will be celebrating its 20th anniversary. Since the 2005 launch of MDL’s website with digitized archival materials from 51 contributing organizations, our aggregated collections have grown in breadth and scope. Today, MDL contains more than 58,000 items from 203 historical societies, libraries, archives, and cultural organizations across Minnesota.
While every Minnesota county is currently represented in MDL, not every county contains a contributing organization. MDL staff have identified eighteen counties represented only by materials shared by organizations outside of those counties, such as neighboring historical societies, or regionally-based or state-wide groups. MDL’s contributors are varied, and include historical societies, libraries, college archives, community groups, cultural organizations, foundations, societies, and more. Learn how to contribute to MDL through our website.
In honor of our upcoming milestone anniversary, MDL staff would like to fill in the map. Throughout the year, we will be contacting groups in the eighteen counties we are missing, encouraging them to join us. The goal is that by the end of 2025, the MDL digital collections will contain items shared by organizations from all 87 counties in the state. We recently added materials from the previously unrepresented counties of Carver and Wabasha, so we are off to a good start!
The eighteen missing counties are:
- Kittson
- Red Lake
- Itasca
- Norman
- Mahnomen
- Hubbard
- Wadena
- Wilkin
- Traverse
- Benton
- Lac qui Parle
- Yellow Medicine
- Swift
- Chippewa
- Meeker
- Rock
- Steele
- Houston
Please contact us for more information or to let us know about a potential contributor in one of these counties.
