2024 Iowa Library Association Fall Conference

Our small team of academics and software engineers at the University of Northern Iowa have been asking how to better display historical photos online for the past decade. We have emerged with a new public platform--Fortepan US, located at https://fortpean.us--that beautifully displays historical photos according to place, time, and theme. We now have an instance for every state, and we developed the prototype featuring family collections and historical photos from Iowa (Fortepan IA--fortepan.us/ia).

Our panel presentation will bring together three library and archive professionals to discuss our experiences with Fortpepan IA. We invite you to discover this gorgeous (free) public portal with timeline, grid, and map view capabilities, crowd-sourced tagging, powerful search, a new digital exhibit tool options, and a sneak preview of the 360ºTour software (coming soon). Join us to learn how you can be part of this quiet but powerful public photo portal movement.