Training « News & Announcements – Digital Commonwealth

by Maureen Mann, MLS Elementary Library Media Specialist Wellesley Public Schools & member of the Outreach & Education Committee

The University of Massachusetts Lowell (U-Mass Lowell) has created two timely resources for K-12 educators to enhance immigration studies. As the Biden administration works to redefine pathways to citizenship for our southern borders over the coming months, these primary source collections, created by Massachusetts students, underscore the importance of fostering student research and documenting student voices.

The Library of New England Immigration sneak previewed their platform at a final face to face Digital Commonwealth event, “The Past Goes Modern,” on January 15, 2020 at the U-Mass Lowell campus. The new digital library provides short student-friendly Ken Burns style clips telling the stories of nearly a dozen ethnic groups that immigrated to the Lowell area over the last 400 years. The project is the brainchild of Distinguished Professor of History in the College of Fine Arts, Humanities, and Social Science Professor Robert Forrant who partnered with Professor Ingrid Hess of the U-Mass Lowell Art and Design Department to secure grants to hire university students as historians, info-graphic designers, and new media journalists to produce these professional works mentored by the U-Mass faculty. Lowell K-12 educators participated in rollout testing and the result is a top-notch teaching resource that is poised to document New England Immigration stories over the next 400 years.

This year students will not visit the mills within the Lowell National Historical Parks, but thankfully this resource—years in the making–launched in the fall of 2020 despite the pandemic to offer a wide scope on the topic minus the bus fees. Even better, it comes with an invitation from the professors to encourage educators to work with students to explore the immigration stories in their students’ own families and communities. The project which both Forrant and Hess describe as a “labor of love” will link system-wide school projects featuring student investigations of community newcomers to the site “in a heartbeat.” Professor Forrant offers K-12 educator professional development for these types of initiatives. For more information contact Robert_Forrant@uml.edu.

Also featured at DC’s “The Past Goes Modern” event, was the U-Mass Libraries Southeast Asian Digital Archive. Within this collection is A City of Refugees, the Memories of Cambodia Collection, circa 1987-1991 from The George N. and Dorothea Tsapataris Collection. Lowell public school ESL teacher, Dorothea Tsapataris, and wife of long-time Lowell Public Schools Superintendent George N. Tsapataris, asked her students to create posters and artwork to help them better understand the History of Lowell Immigration, and to help Lowell better understand them.

These full color digital resources document cultural traditions and memories of Cambodian refugees recently resettled after escaping from their war-torn homeland during the 80’s. The quality of this grade 3-6 artwork is impressive, sometimes shocking. The collection provides an historical link from ESL students of the past to those students living or learning about immigration in the present.

Ms. Tsapataris’ philosophy stated within her project introduction would be as relevant in today’s classroom, “Whether one is a native born Lowellian or born elsewhere, all our ancestral roots are planted beyond the shores of the United States mainland. . . . The Future of Lowell is the children of today and their descendants.”

The collection was preserved with the foresight of former U-Mass Lowell Library Director George Hart who had a passion for digitizing primary source documents received from the community. Using Omeka platforms and Dublin Core metadata standards, the university digital services staff and specialized librarians curated these collections which feature valuable cross reference links to other primary source collections within the U-Mass Library system and the Lowell Historical Museum of History, whose archives catalog is maintained by the university library system.

How well are people discovering and understanding the photographs in your digital collections? There are currently more than 100,000 photographs in Digital Commonwealth. How can you improve the chances of users finding the ones that are relevant to their research?

Join the Digital Commonwealth at a special program called Enhancing Photograph Descriptions: Advice from the Photo Detective, which will be offered at three locations in different parts of the state.

Join us at one of these events, where photograph expert Maureen Taylor will show us how to create the best metadata we can for the photographs in our digital collections. Maureen Taylor, known as the Photo Detective, is an internationally renowned expert in historic photo identification, preservation and genealogical research. She is the author of several books on identifying, organizing and understanding photographs, and has been featured on television programs, newspapers and magazines.

Here are the details and registration links for the two sessions that have been scheduled so far:

Date: Tuesday, October 6, 2015
Time: 10:30 – 11:30 AM
Location: New England Historic Genealogical Society
99-101 Newbury Street, Boston
Members/Non-members: $25/$40
Register

Date: Wednesday, October 21, 2015
Time: 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM
Location: Forbes Library
29 West Street
Northampton
Members/Non-members: $25/$40
Register

Date: Tuesday, November 10, 2015
Time of event: 10:00 AM – 1:30 PM
Schedule: 10:00-10:15 – Registration;
10:15-11:30 – Tour of Nickerson Archives and discussion of its digitization projects
11:30-12:30 – Lunch on your own
12:30-1:30 – Maureen Taylor lecture
Location: Wilkens Library, Cape Cod Community College, West Barnstable
Directions | Campus Map
Lunch options: Cafeteria on campus (in Grossman Commons); restaurants (Subway, Burger King, etc.) down the street
Register

By Harold Smith

If you work at a public library, especially if you work at a small library where opportunities for collaboration are rare and money for new projects is even rarer, then you should read about this opportunity that is now available. Here’s the deal in a nutshell. If you have an unprocessed collection, even if you aren’t sure of their importance, you can arrange for someone to come to your library to assess the collection and to walk you through the entire process of project design, digitization, metadata creation, rights management, and putting the collection online. If you have never done anything like this before, they will help you learn. If you have done similar work but are simply strapped for time or money, they can take a lot of the work off your hands and they can do it with grant money instead of your money. All they ask in return is that you share what you digitize. That doesn’t mean you lose your collection or even that you lose the right to host the digital collection if you want, it just means that the metadata and a thumbnail image will be used to link your content with the content from other collections. This expands the reach of your collection and helps get your library more attention, but this aggregation of data also helps develop new opportunities for research. It’s a great opportunity to honor that donor who gave items not so that they could gather dust in your basement, but so that they could be used and shared in meaningful ways. It also is an opportunity to improve your digitization skills without taking on an entire project by yourself. I attended a workshop about this at the Jones Public Library in Amherst on June 18th, and I left feeling really excited about the whole idea. Like I said, it’s a sweet deal.

Bringing in wood, Chesterfield, Mass. from the Jones — Bringing in wood, Chesterfield, Mass. One of the treasures from the Clifton Johnson Collection, 1880-1940 at the Jones Library Special Collections.

How is this possible? The Public Library Partnership Project is funded through the Digital Public Library of America by the Gates Foundation. Four states are involved and in each state there is a digital library partner to provide training. In Massachusetts, this assistance is provided by the Digital Commonwealth and the Boston Public Library. If you decide to get involved these are the folks who will come and work with you. It’s not like working with a vendor who will come and scan your collection only to leave you with a bunch of questions and a confusing list of file names. The goal here is different. The goal is to make it as easy as possible for you, and to create a sense of perpetual engagement so that there is a process in place for continued sharing. One example of that ongoing relationship is the goal of working with public libraries to create exhibitions from the newly ingested content. The exhibitions would be built in part with your content, as well as with your knowledge of the community that is sharing the content, and they would be hosted by the Digital Public Library of America, whose site has had more than one million unique visitors. To make participation in these exhibitions easier, additional training will also be available about how to put a collection together, about writing for the web, and for learning to use Omeka when putting exhibitions together. The DPLA exhibits would share your content on equal footing with content from other, often larger organizations, and it would make it part of a national narrative. After participating in that process, you could then take those same skills to build a local exhibit designed specifically for your own community. It would be a great way to keep the new skills sharp and to give back to the local community that shared the content and has a deeper connection to it.

To learn more about this opportunity, please consider filling out the very simple form that will get the ball rolling. You can find it on the Digital Commonwealth site. If your public library is not a member of the Digital Commonwealth, joining is a great option, but don’t abandon the idea of participating in the digitization project if you are not members. Like public radio, support is important and encouraged, but no one is turned away. To do so would undercut the whole idea behind such projects. Worst case scenario, you end up chatting with someone at the Boston Public Library about the interesting stuff at your library and the possibility of finally getting it processed and out where it can be accessed. And, if while filling out the form you realize you aren’t even sure how to answer the questions, remember that putting “I don’t know” is a perfectly fine and honest response. Someone will get back to you and will help you along; that’s what is so great about this project.

If you’re interested in this opportunity, you should attend the next and final workshop in the series at SAILS Inc., Lakeville, MA on July 16 from 9:30 AM – 4:30 PM.

Editor’s note: members of Digital Commonwealth’s Outreach Committee organized a metadata work party for Digital Commonwealth members. Digital Commonwealth would like to thank

the Jacob Edwards Library, Southbridge, Mass., for hosting the event
the staff from the Boston Public Library (Digital Commonwealth’s technology partner) for providing excellent metadata instruction in a friendly manner
the participants, including Carol Kelly, who kindly offered to summarize the event in this blog post.

Additional metadata work parties will be scheduled in the future. Please email nheywood@masshist.org for more information.

If the term “metadata work party” doesn’t excite you then you’d want to skip this workshop. But if you’re like me and already elbow-deep in digitization, sort of learning new skills as you go and hoping you’re getting it right – this was the place for you. We understood that the Digital Commonwealth folks were piloting this program with us and planning on offering more of this sort of thing so it’s worth a short critique….it was great. Does that seem a little too non-evaluative? Let me add details.

The introduction helped me get a clearer grasp of what the Digital Commonwealth (DC) is doing and how they’ll harvest the metadata we develop in our individual projects. I was especially interested in understanding that the DC can host the metadata for a collection that our home libraries may keep on their server or host the actual collection. We also were reminded that the DC will assist in digitization but that we need to provide the metadata. Then they got right to the very complete set of links they’d organized for us.

If you’re a librarian, you’ll be familiar with the concept of “authority” files. If not, the concept is simple – an authority file lets

you standardize how you refer to people/places/things so they can be sorted and organized easily. The workshop offered us links to authority files on, among other things, geographic names, images and the lovely MODS file from the Library of Congress.( Go and look at it http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/) So rule one in developing metadata – use the authority files! These links alone were worth the drive to Southbridge.

Then we moved right to the “work” part of the meeting. Tom Blake, Digital Projects Manager, and Danny Pucci, Lead Digital Projects Librarian, had brought additional BPL staff along, laughingly named the metadata mob.* As we began creating the metadata for the images we’d brought with us, each group got one of these highly skilled people to sit with us, looking over our shoulders, answering all our particular questions and guiding us to figure out how to bounce between the authority files and the form from the Digital Commonwealth. There’s nothing like doing something with an expert to coach. I think we all felt we got it and can easily move from this little workshop to creating good metadata files that will easily translate to the Digital Commonwealth website and provide access to everyone. As I said before – it was a great workshop.

By Carol A. Kelly, Member of the Board of the Friends, Sawyer Free Library, Gloucester

*Monica Shin, Nichole Shea, and Sarah Hayes

Digital Commonwealth will be hosting 3 upcoming workshops to prepare public libraries to contribute content to the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) as part of a Public Librarian Partnership Grant recently awarded to DPLA by the Gates Foundation.

Bread and Roses Strike of 1912, Lawrence History Center

In these workshops, public librarians will learn how to work with Digital Commonwealth to select content for digitization and/or identify existing digital content, digitize new content and provide metadata and contextualization for that content, and determine potential themes for DPLA, such as this exhibit concerning the Bread & Roses Strike in Lawrence: (http://dp.la/exhibitions/exhibits/show/breadandroses)

The workshop dates have been scheduled:

Wednesday, April 16, 9:30am – 4:30pm at Boston Public Library (Application deadline is April 9, 2014, 5pm)
Wednesday, June 18, 9:30am – 4:30pm at Jones Public Library, Amherst, MA
Wednesday, July 16, 9:30am – 4:30pm at SAILS Inc., Lakeville, MA

The ideal candidates for these workshops will be public librarians who deal with local history, genealogy and similar unique content. If interested, registration is now available.

Digital Commonwealth board members Kim Cochrane and Deb Dejonker-Berry teamed up to present “Connect to the Community: Using Digital Commonwealth Collections to Develop Lesson Plans” at the MSLA conference on March 10, 2014 in Hyannis, Massachusetts: http://maschoolibraries.org/content/view/1195/791/

The Massachusetts School Library Association annual conference is attended by school librarians and educators, and also graduate students in these fields. Deb Dejonker-Berry, Director of the Eastham Public Library, gave an overview to Digital Commonwealth. Kim Cochrane, Curriculum Librarian and Coordinator of Curriculum and Instructional Technology at Framingham State University, spoke about how school librarians and educators can use the online content available from Digital Commonwealth’s portal and repository, as well as some other websites, within the classroom. Kim used some of the existing lesson plans developed with Digital Commonwealth’s content as examples: http://members.digitalcommonwealth.org/lesson-plans

Kim and Deb noticed that the session generated many positive responses! Many attendees stated that they planned to use Digital Commonwealth’s website. Also some indicated they would explore opportunities to interact with their local cultural organizations that either are, or could be, Digital Commonwealth members and encourage these organizations to make digital content available via the new repository.

The following is a guest post by Amy Benson, who has been working the past year under the auspices of the Boston Public Library to review Digital Commonwealth member metadata issues.

My recent collaboration with the BPL, to prepare metadata from a number of libraries for the Digital Commonwealth Repository, has been a pleasure and a great learning experience. That’s one reason for the title of this post. The other is that each of the letters represents a basic principle to keep in mind when it’s your turn to create new, or enhance existing metadata.

G for Granularity: The discovery is in the details. Use existing local expertise to record place names, people’s names, landmarks, and other specifics. Transcribe text from signs, labels, posters, etc. In short, describe items at the smallest useful level that your resources allow.

A for Automation: Use available tools to facilitate your work. If existing metadata is in a printed document, consider scanning and using OCR to capture the text electronically. If you have data in one system, explore options with a vendor or IT person for exporting and repurposing it.

A for Authority: Follow metadata standards appropriate to the materials you are describing, such as RDA, LCSH, Getty vocabularies, or Library of Congress Thesaurus for Graphic Materials.

S for Structure: The more structured your data is, the more useful it can be. Splitting first and last names and using start and end dates instead of a date range will yield more powerful search and delivery options. It is much easier to combine data that’s been separated than it is to separate blocks of text. Structure your data by putting each element in a separate spreadsheet cell, by using special punctuation in a text file, or with XML tags.

Following these basic principles when creating metadata is more important than focusing on one metadata schema or tool. Systems come and go, but data endures. Descriptive information written in library hand a hundred+ years ago has been transcribed and enhanced and is helping users locate resources in our online databases today. With the right transformations, the same metadata you create for a local system can be made available in Flickr, the Digital Commonwealth, or the Internet Archive – from pencil and paper to MARC, MODS, JSON, and beyond.

Get more mileage out of the GAAS in your tank and boost the usefulness, flexibility, and longevity of your metadata. Go for Granularity, adopt Automation, respect Authority, set up a solid Structure, and above all, be consistent and enjoy yourself. You are creating a lasting resource to make cultural heritage materials more available and useful to all.

Amy Benson
Librarian/Archivist for Digital Initiatives
Schlesinger Library
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study
Harvard University

On Monday, June 24, 2013, Digital Commonwealth of Massachusetts held a free half-day workshop focusing on developing lesson plans featuring digital content. The workshop was held at the Whittemore Library, Framingham State University, and was attended by school library media specialists, new teachers, and professionals from cultural organizations interested in making (and using) digital content for educational purposes.

The workshop included an introduction to Digital Commonwealth the organization (a collaborative initiative promoting digital content of Massachusetts cultural institutions), the existing Digital Commonwealth portal and repository (an online discovery and storage platform), screenshots of the upcoming new system (currently in development by the Boston Public Library, a partner organization to Digital Commonwealth), and examples of existing lesson plans using digital content.

Attendees responded favorably to the variety of digital content available via the metadata within the existing portal which includes links to video clips from WGBH’s Open Vault; images of historical broadsides from the State Library of Massachusetts; and audio files and photographic images from NOBLE’s Digital Heritage. Marianne Brown, a new teacher, talked about how she developed a lesson plan featuring photographs from the Watertown Free Public Library (digital images of these photographs are stored in the current Digital Commonwealth repository). Marianne’s lesson plan is available as a PDF on Digital Commonwealth’s lesson plan page: http://digitalcommonwealth.org/lesson_plans

Kim Cochrane, Curriculum Librarian, Framingham State University, and Nancy Heywood, Digital Projects Coordinator, Massachusetts Historical Society, led the workshop. Both Kim and Nancy serve on Digital Commonwealth’s Outreach Committee and will review and revise the program. They hope to schedule two more workshops later this year. For information and notification about future workshops, email Nancy Heywood: nheywood@masshist.org.

Over the next several months, until the end of the calendar year, Digital Commonwealth will be providing metadata production and quality control assistance for collections digitized under the BPL’s LSTA-funded statewide digitization program.

The goal is to assure that at least 40,000 records are prepared for ingest into the new repository system from at least 40 different organizations. A team of metadata workers, led by Amy Benson and the BPL Digital Services Department, has already begun to evaluate the current states and various forms of descriptive records and how to best transform and optimize them into standards and systems compliant metadata. This work is being supported with grant funds associated with the Digital Hubs Pilot Project of the Digital Public Library of America (http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/dplaalpha/about/digital-hubs-pilot-project/).

Amy Benson is currently the Librarian/Archivist for Digital Projects at Radcliffe’s Schlesinger Library. She is familiar to many due to the multiple workshops and presentations she has delivered, often in association with the NEDCC. Amy also served on the original Digital Commonwealth Executive Committee when the organization was first established.

If your organization has had anything digitized by the BPL for Digital Commonwealth and your descriptive records need to be created, transformed, or enhanced for ingest, then you will be contacted by Amy and/or the BPL team between now and December 2013. Please direct any questions about this initiative to Tom Blake (tblake@bpl.org; 617 859-2039).

Are you a teacher (4th grade to 12th grade) who is interested in developing lesson plans featuring digital content? Could you benefit from a half-day workshop focused on learning about digital collections and ideas about how to use digitized primary source materials within the classroom? Please consider attending a free workshop on June 24th! The workshop will be held in the Room UM (Upper Mezzanine) 16, Whittemore Library, Framingham State University, State Street, Framingham, from 9:00 AM until 1:30 PM on Monday, June 24, 2013.

Although individual teachers are certainly welcome, this workshop is an excellent place for team teachers or grade-level teams to hear about a statewide initiative presenting digital content from cultural institutions in Massachusetts, learn about some existing lesson plans, and get some advice about how to prepare new plans featuring digital content. The workshop will also include some hands-on time when attendees will start developing something to use in their classrooms!

To register: http://members.digitalcommonwealth.org/events

For information and notification about future workshops, email Nancy Heywood: nheywood@masshist.org.

News & Announcements – Digital Commonwealth

Category Archives: Training

New England Immigration Stories by Students

Special Event with Maureen Taylor, the Photo Detective

A Sweet Deal for Public Libraries

Metadata Work Party Report, By Carol A. Kelly

DPLA: Gates Foundation Grant

Digital Commonwealth Reaches School Librarians at MSLA

Metadata Creation is a GAAS!

Half-Day Workshop on Developing Lesson Plans

Amy Benson hired to advise members on Metadata procedures

Developing Lesson Plans with Digital Content from Digital Commonwealth