Audiences for Pennsylvania’ s digital collections MIDDLE AND HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS AND TEACHERS— Students and teachers will be able to use unique, rare resources that cannot be accessed otherwise except at the institution holding them. In so doing, they will meet Pennsylvania standards for history that call for students to develop the skills of explaining, analyzing, interpreting, synthesizing, and evaluating many types of historical sources. LOCAL AND FAMILY HISTORIANS— Nationwide, some 35 million people use the Internet for family history research, and Pennsylvania libraries and archives report significant use of their collections for this purpose. Increased digitization of historical materials will aid a growing audience interested in connecting with personal and community histories. COLLEGE STUDENTS— Nationally, Pennsylvania ranks fifth in higher education enrollment and third in the number of higher education institutions. Having access to a wealth of documents and other historical sources online will encourage college students to be more ambitious in undertaking their class assignments and will provide them with a wider array of research resources. SCHOLARS AND RESEARCHERS— This audience, numbering thousands, uses Pennsylvania’s historical collections and extends awareness of them by teaching, publishing, and making presentations. A large selection of digitized Pennsylvania materials available on the Web will call attention to the key role the Commonwealth has played in many histories, which, in turn, will allow Pennsylvanians to gain a richer sense of the Commonwealth’s heritage. HERITAGE TOURISM DEVELOPMENT— Heritage tourism has proven to be a significant economic driver in Pennsylvania. Digitized collections serve the heritage tourism sector in two ways: by providing the raw materials from which tourism professionals develop public programming and by providing history travelers with additional reasons to visit or to extend their stays. FUNDERS— The purpose of this project was to identify and prioritize subject areas and materials for digitization and link them What do you think? Are these the audiences for digitization?