The Pennsylvania Historical Society has about 21 million items in its collection. Artifacts include photographs, personal diaries, war correspondence, maps, and geological surveys. However it has nowhere near enough resources to scan each one.
Due to the sesquicentennial of the Civil War in 2011, the Society has started hand-picking items that hint at the rest of the collection. Archivist Kathleen Miller recently went through the papers of Andrew Atkinson Humphreys, who not only was a major general in the Civil War, but also a geologist and fought in the Seminole Native American war.
The project is meant to encourage more people to use the collection. Administrators at the Historical Society say about half of their visitors are amateur genealogists looking up their family tree.
You can learn more at http://www.hsp.org/ and especially at http://www.hsp.org/default.aspx?id=976.
