MADISON, Wis. - It's a stately old building with looming columns, worn marble stairways and arched doorways - dedicated in 1900 "to the conservation, advancement and dissemination of American Heritage."

But while the Wisconsin Historical Society contains one of the largest American history archives anywhere, fewer people have visited in recent years - 40 percent fewer than in 1987 - as more of them, including students at the nearby University of Wisconsin, turn to the Internet as their basic research tool.

So the historical society and many other institutions with large collections are doing something they see as means of survival: They're going digital - creating and uploading images of many items in their collections for all the World Wide Web to see.

"History belongs to everybody; it shouldn't be locked away in dark rooms," says Michael Edmonds, deputy administrator of the Wisconsin Historical Society's library-archives division. "It should be on everybody's laptops at Starbucks."

The movement to "digitize" collections received a lot of attention last month when popular search engine Google announced a deal with several university libraries to put their books - or snippets of those books - online. Users would have greatest access to books with content that's not limited by copyright constraints.

But even before Google began scanning books, many libraries, archives and museums had already been quietly digitizing their most popular and rarest of collections and, increasingly, creating Web sites that put those collections in context.

It's a trend that Edmonds calls "revolutionary" - and necessary.

"Our future depends on us being able to turn our collections inside out - to show people what we have," he says.