Trusting the Land: Digital Commonwealth Explores New Land Research and Partnerships for K-12 Educators

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Pakachoag: Where the River Bends documents the history of Pakachoag Hill in current day Worcester

By Maureen Mann
Maureen Mann is a Digital Commonwealth Board Member,
Digital Humanities Librarian and Civics Education Consultant


Until legislators and school districts officially decide whether Massachusetts students will recognize Indigenous People’s Day, Columbus Day, or both, educators choosing either cultural celebration do so at the risk of community push-back.

Studying the land, however, offers a peaceful curriculum alternative, not to mention a solid fit with Massachusetts social studies standards and the “Changing Landscapes” theme from the Educating for American Democracy Roadmap, a federally funded guide to civics inquiry released in 2021.

Digital Commonwealth explored land histories in a recent virtual event “From Land Acknowledgement to Land Partnership: the making of Pakachoag: Where the River Bends.”

The College of the Holy Cross funded a partnership of land researchers, media educators, and students to create a 45 minute documentary which tells the story of the land beneath their campus. The film is clear, well-researched, and suitable for young audiences.

It “makes a meaningful resource for our community,” says Professor Sarah Luria, film director and English and Environmental studies professor at Holy Cross. “The fact is every community has the potential to tell a story that is land-centered.” Professor Luria believes connecting with “trustworthy” experts in the community is an important first step to telling successful land histories.

Two of her trustworthy partners were Director of the Greater Worcester Land Trust, Colin Novick and Thomas Doughton of Nipmuc heritage and Senior Lecturer at Holy Cross Center for Interdisciplinary Studies. Both appear in the film walking historical sites side by side while sharing their specialized research which blends beautifully into a fuller history of Pakachoag Village and people of Nipmuc heritage living in central Massachusetts.

“One of the ideas we are working with as we went through this whole project is the notion of erasure . . . which is this notion that magically all of the folks who previously lived here, disappeared one day,” says Novick, “in many cases part of that erasure is building over landscapes that actually are historically or culturally significant.”

As a result of the 2020 film, the Greater Worcester Land Trust and the Quinsigamond Band of Nipmuc, an organization including those of Nipmuc heritage and supporters, partnered in application for a conservation partnership grant from the State of Massachusetts Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs Division of Conservation Services to save one of the last parcels of Pakachoag Hill, the source of drinking water for the native community known as Pakachoag Spring.

Educators might not be in a place to guide students to create a film or a new legal land agreement, but there are several digital resources to help educators connect students to their place in the world.

MASSACHUSETTS LAND TRUST COALITION
The Massachusetts Land Trust Coalition website provides a map of all land trusts in the state. This resource gathers experts, runs virtual programs and sends a monthly newsletter with the latest on land conservation and preservation.

THE COMMUNITY PRESERVATION ACT
The Community Preservation Act (CPA) is a state program designed to help encourage open space, historical preservation, affordable housing, and outdoor recreation. Cities and towns “adopt” the program through town meeting approval which translates into a ballot question at the next town election. Their GIS map shows which towns have adopted this smart growth program passed in 2000. Students will be curious to learn where their town stands in the adoption process.

NATIVE LAND DIGITAL
This Application Programming Interface (API) project created by Victor Temprano documents original native homelands of tribal communities around the world. The resource provides an opportunity for Humanities and Technology educators to partner in explaining API code and data contribution.

As more resources present themselves over time, land histories will improve. Colin Novick made a direct plea to the event’s audience of cultural archivists.

“There is a lot of really great material that is currently hidden to the rest of the world which is in the private collections of individual towns. . . . The documents that you have, the books that you have that aren’t digitized usually have wonderful resources that [will provide] the rest of us a great expanded consciousness if we could eventually get that stuff shared out there.”

The Digital Commonwealth no-cost digitization program provides important support to bring those resources to the greater community. The Boston Public Library is the worksite for digitization and the process begins with a simple Digitization Request Form.

“There are no size limitations,” says Jake Sadow, Statewide Digitization Project Archivist, when it comes to map digitization capabilities, “they should be unrolled and flattened for a few weeks before they come. We can handle pretty much anything.”

Curriculum coordinators can advocate for partnerships for land histories within their community by encouraging local historical societies and libraries to digitize materials, perhaps even offering a civics credit for students helping to ready materials for digitization.

DC3 Repository System: An Overview

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In order to better support the ever-growing collections of digitized content from Digital Commonwealth member institutions, developers in the Boston Public Library’s Digital Services team have been building the next generation of the library’s digital asset management system. This new system, built entirely on open-source software, uses cloud storage for file management, allowing the repository to potentially grow exponentially, without the constraints of locally-managed servers and storage devices.

This new system is a suite of applications, APIs, and services that are collectively known as “DC3,” since this is the third version of the asset management system used to support preservation and dissemination of digitized primary source materials. (Click here for an overview of the previous version.)

The heart of the new system is an application called Curator, which is responsible for managing all of the descriptive, administrative, and technical metadata for objects and files in the repository. Curator provides an application programming interface (API) to support ingesting new items into the repository or making changes to existing items. Backed by a relational database, the Curator data model supports a wide variety of content types, as well as rich descriptive metadata for ingested items conforming to the Digital Commonwealth metadata application profile, which is based on the Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS) created by the Library of Congress. This system provides improved data validation and authority control, making better use of controlled vocabularies and thesauri offered by the Library of Congress and the Getty Research Institute.

Curator interacts with a number of other applications in the DC3 ecosystem, including:

  • ARK Manager – manages unique Archival Resource Key identifiers and permalinks for repository items.
  • AVI Processor – analyzes ingested files to extract technical metadata and creates derivative files used for viewing and downloading.
  • BPLDC Authority API – supports querying a variety of controlled data sources (such as LC, Getty, and GeoNames) for descriptive metadata fields including subjects, locations, genres, languages, resource types, names, etc.
  • Canataloupe – provides high-resolution images and deep zooming functionality for the DC user interface via the IIIF Image API.
  • Solr – supports indexing and retrieval of metadata and full-text content; powers the search features for the DC user interface.

In addition to the increased capacity (and decreased maintenance) provided by moving storage infrastructure to the cloud, this system provides a number of advantages. The relational data model used by Curator supports the ability to make updates to existing metadata much more efficiently. By spreading functionality over a variety of applications, the system is more fault-tolerant overall, and components can be re-engineered without the need for a complete overhaul of the entire system. And because this system uses more widely-adopted technologies and components, it will be easier to maintain and on-board new developers in the future.

All components of the DC3 system are built on freely-available open-source software. ARK-manager, AVI Processor, and BPLDC Authority API are custom-built applications created and maintained by BPL Digital Services – like Curator, code for many of these projects is available on GitHub.

Please contact us with any questions, comments, or concerns.

Celebrating Women’s Sports on the 50th Anniversary of Title IX

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Smith College Class of 1902 Basketball Team (C.1902), Wikimedia Commons.

More than a century ago, the first women’s collegiate basketball championship was played in Massachusetts between Smith College sophomores and freshman. “Smith March Madness 1892” is a 8:20 minute video about the game. Senda Berenson, known as the “Mother of Women’s Basketball” and Director of Physical Training at Smith, introduced the game of basketball, developed by James Naismith the year before, to her Smith students. “Major newspapers and magazines in the Northeast covered the championship game, and reporters equated the popularity of the event to the Harvard Yale men’s football game.”

Senda Berenson wrote an article entitled “Basket Ball for Women” in the September 1894 issue of Physical Education, available courtesy of Springfield College, Babson Library, Archives and Special Collections.  She says, “The value of athletic sports for men is not questioned. It is a different matter, however, when we speak of athletics for women. Until very recent years, the so-called ideal woman was a small waisted, small footed, small brained damsel, who prided herself on her delicate health, who thought fainting interesting, and hysterics fascinating. Wider and more thorough knowledge has given us more wholesome and saner ideas.”

Digital Commonwealth and other archives and libraries have helped to preserve and provide access to documents, images, and audio and video files related to women in sports. One example is the audio file for a lecture given at UMass in 1978 by Wilma Rudolph, bronze medalist in 1956 Olympics and three-time gold medalist in 1960. At the time of the lecture, she had just published her autobiography, Wilma, and hearing her story in her own voice is inspirational. In the audio file, she speaks of her upbringing as the 20th of 22 children in small-town Tennessee. As a child, the fastest woman in the world had survived pneumonia, scarlet fever, and polio, and wore a leg brace for much of her early life.

The challenges that Wilma Rudolph had to overcome were many. She graciously gave credit to the family members, friends, fellow athletes, and coaches who helped her along the way. As she tells her story, she says that there came a point when she had to have faith in herself in order to reach her full potential.

Wilma Rudolph at the finish line during 50 yard dash at track meet in Madison Square Garden (1961), Wikimedia Commons.

Wilma Rudolph was a world class athelete before Title IX was signed into law. She had to make her way on her own and with the support system that she was able to construct without the benefit of the law enshrining women’s rights.

Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 (“Title IX”), signed into law on June 23, 1972, was designed to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex in education programs and activities in all public and private elementary and secondary schools, school districts, colleges, and universities receiving any Federal funds .Title IX has broader implications than just creating a level playing field for women athletes. But in the years since the law was passed, untold opportunities have opened up for women in sports.

Women’s Sport Foundation, “Chasing Equity: The Triumphs, Challenges, and Opportunities in Sports for Girls and Women” (2020), p 13.

The implementation of Title IX has had a rocky road. It was not clear in the original law exactly how educational institutions would balance spending for men’s and women’s athletic programs. Universities with men’s football and men’s basketball programs that were spending and generating vast sums of money felt threatened by the law. Digital Commonwealth provides a link to a 1979 MacNeil/Lehrer Report on Title IX Women’s Sports. In his introduction to the half hour video file, Robert MacNeil says “many people wonder whether glamorous, big-time, big-money college sports are threatened by the drive to give women an equal share in college athletics. Tonight, sex discrimination in sports, and the debate over a law called Title IX.”

Progress has not been easy. Digital Commonwealth and its member institutions will continue to provide access to documentation of the uphill battle for equity in sports for girls and women.

Barbara Schneider, Member Outreach and Education Committee

Women’s Cross Country Race (1995)
Courtesy of Springfield College, Babson Library, Archives and Special Collections.