Throughout the spring and fall of 2018, the WCFTR’s film and video collections are moving from the basement of the Wisconsin Historical Society to a new, state-of-the-art climate controlled storage facility on the east side of Madison. Located near the Yahara River between East Washington Avenue and Williamson Street, the $46.7 million State Archive Preservation Facility is slowly filling its 188,000 square feet of climate-controlled space. The Center’s film and video collections, totaling over 25,000 individual reels and tapes, will share space with the collections of the Wisconsin Historical Society and the Wisconsin Veteran’s Museum, totaling 200,000 library books and 55,000 archival boxes with millions of pages of manuscripts and documents from state agencies and officials.
The collection move is a great leap forward for the Center’s collection in many, many ways and has already resulted in the cataloging of a large backlog of archival materials. Throughout 2018 and early 2019 while the collection is in-transit, retrieval times may be slightly delayed from our usual one week advanced notice for appointment times. Please contact staff at least two weeks in advance during this time to ensure materials are available. The Center’s archival collection of paper materials (manuscript collections, posters, photographs) will be staying on-site at the Wisconsin Historical Society, so retrieval times for those materials will not be affected.