Fortepan IA-- a public photo history platform featuring curated Iowa family snapshots

We love historical photos of Iowa.

Fortepan IA is a public photo history portal dedicated to preserving historical photographs of everyday Iowa life and sharing them on a compelling digital platform. The Fortepan IA portal is built by a team of University of Northern Iowa faculty and staff, and serves the entire state of Iowa. 

Our group presently meets on Wednesdays 4:15-5pm as a "check in," in person and also via Zoom. We organize our volunteer work around scanning Iowa family snapshots at high resolution; and uploading the photos to the portal, adding descriptive tags, and working on getting the dates as accurate as possible. P

lease join us! Maybe you have a collection of your own you'd like to scan.

We try to make Fortepan IA photos as searchable as possible, so we upload and tag the images with details within each photograph. We welcome old timers who have a connection to Iowa and maybe a knowledge of local Iowa history, to help us date photos. We also welcome folks with specific areas of expertise--in cars, fish, trains, Iowa towns, local history, etc.

Anyone who is interested in history or photographs would be be a good fit! Bring a friend. Let's talk about Iowa history!

If you are a UNI student, we have students constantly interning and/or volunteering for this project on campus (we are based in Rod Library), so we have young and old participants.

contact us at fortepaniowa@uni.edu.