Category Archives: Member Projects

Digital Commonwealth Reaches School Librarians at MSLA

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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.

Metadata Creation is a GAAS!

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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

The Public Library of Brookline’s Digitization Experience, by Anne Reed

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(Anne Reed is the Assistant Director for Administration at the Brookline Public Library)

The Public Library of Brookline has worked with the Digital Commonwealth since 2007 when Anne Clark uploaded 10 historical photographs into the repository, and provided feedback on the data entry and batch uploading process. From this beginning, Anne Clark and I selected the historic Brookline photographs to be digitized by a local company, Boston Photo Imaging, and with funding from our Board of Library Trustees we were ready to proceed. Anne Clark, Colin Wilkins and I provided the metadata for the photographs; once this task was completed everything was uploaded to the Digital Commonwealth repository. Pleased with the results we proposed a second project digitizing our glass plate negatives. Boston Photo Imaging scanned the negatives and saved the images to an external hard drive. We followed the same procedures as in the first project and these 101 images are now available in the Digital Commonwealth repository.

At the Digital Commonwealth Annual Conferences March 25, 2010 Anne Clark & I presented a session “Bringing the Past to the Future: The Digitization of the Historic Photograph Collection of the Public Library of Brookline”. We also shared our experiences at the April 26, 2011 Digital Commonwealth conference in the session, “From Your Archive to the Web: Managing the Project”. We encouraged libraries to ask questions, consult the experts and ad their collections to Digital Commonwealth.

Brookline Paint Shop
Brookline Paint Shop

We applied for digitization services from the Boston Public Library to have digital images created of our identified and numbered manuscript collections. The BPL’s Library for the Commonwealth program enables BPL staff to provide free digitization services to Digital Commonwealth members who want to make their collections available in the repository.

Our materials are now at the BPL being digitized by their state-of-the-art equipment.  Soon our Brookline High School yearbooks will also be available through the Internet Archives. Once our materials are returned we will begin the metadata entry. We are very fortunate to have the resources and expert staff of the Boston Public Library working to help to libraries and historical societies in the Commonwealth share digital collections.

The Public Library of Brookline’s collections may be seen in the current Digital Commonwealth repository  http://www.digitalcommonwealth.org/items/browse?collection=112  OR in the preview version of the upcoming new repository: https://search.digitalcommonwealth.org/collections/commonwealth:5425kb612 

Read more about the BPL’s digitization services for Digital Commonwealth members in this blog post:   http://digitalcommonwealth.org/blog/?p=113.