Rose Sherman, Minnesota Historical Society

Rose Sherman

Minnesota Historical Society (mnhs.org)

The Minnesota Historical Society’s website is massive—more than 12,000 pages, plus nearly 10 million items called up from connected databases, including genealogy records for family historians and 200,000 historic photos. The site gets 8 million visits a year and is so big it takes the equivalent of six full-time employees to run it.

The woman who manages that behemoth is Rose Sherman, who spent seventeen years at 3M as a programmer and analyst on business systems before coming to the MNHS eight years ago, not long after the organization launched its website.

Though Sherman’s previous job allowed her to travel the world, she came to MNHS, she says, to have a closer connection to the people she was serving—for example, the thousands of school kids who visit the MNHS every year. “The kinds of things we do on the website, there’s no competition, and they’re very interesting projects,” she says. One example: the “Greatest Generation” project. “We’re trying to preserve the stories of people who lived through the Depression, the war, and the [postwar] boom,” she says. So far, more than 550 people have shared their stories online, and the entries have been read on an average of 10,000 times a month.

Though the site is about history, there is nothing static about it. They add pages for new exhibits regularly, and after the I-35W Bridge collapse, the site put up historical video of the bridge being built in 1967, along with other historical documents.

“History,” Sherman says, “is happening all the time.”