Funding approved for continued digitization for Digital Commonwealth members

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Earlier this month the Governor approved the inclusion of $147,532 in the state FY14 budget to continue digitization for Digital Commonwealth members under the BPL’s Library for the Commonwealth program.

This money will continue the digital-imaging services that the BPL has provided in partnership with Digital Commonwealth since 2011 through funding provided by a LSTA grant awarded through the MBLC. The state expenditure attests to the valuable work achieved these past two years by the BPL and Digital Commonwealth. Thousands of significant historical items have been digitized and will soon be made available collectively through a new state-of-the-art repository under development at the BPL that just this past week celebrated its initial public beta release.

With this new funding, the BPL will continue to accept project applications and hope to grow this program to include metadata creation and other services in the near future. The BPL and Digital Commonwealth look forward to working with DC members on their digital projects throughout FY14 and beyond.

For more information about participating in this program, details are provided at the BPL’s project blog.

Half-Day Workshop on Developing Lesson Plans

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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.

Amy Benson hired to advise members on Metadata procedures

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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).