Half-Day Workshop on Developing Lesson Plans

Posted on by

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

Posted on by

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).

Three new members added to Digital Commonwealth Board of Directors

Posted on by

Digital Commonwealth is pleased to announce the addition of three new members on the board of directors to replace outgoing board members. The three new members are Debra DeJonker-Berry from the Jonathan Bourne Public Library, Kelcy Shepard from Amherst College, and Elizabeth Thomsen from the NOBLE network.

These new members will be replacing Sarah Campbell from Holy Cross; Jessica Colati from Worcester Polytechnic Institute; and Kristi Chadwick, former President of Digital Commonwealth, who is the current Director of the Emily Williston Memorial Library in Easthampton.

Debra DeJonker-Berry has worked for the past year as the Information Systems Librarian in Bourne. Prior to this position she brings to the Board the experience of nearly twenty years service as the director of public libraries in Halifax and Provincetown Massachusetts.

 Kelcy Shepard is currently the Head of Digital Programs at Amherst College. Previously she worked at UMass Amherst as the Digital Interfaces Librarian.  She’s been publishing, teaching, and presenting widely on a multitude of archival-related topics such as metadata, EAD, XML, and The Archivist’s Toolkit since 2000.

Elizabeth Thomsen is a long-time Member Services Manager for NOBLE, the North of Boston Library Exchange. She is responsible for training of staff at the 28 public and academic libraries that belong to NOBLE. She also oversees NOBLE’s Digital Heritage Omeka repository. Perhaps she is also familiar as the presenter of “Future of the Past: Digital Libraries in the Age of Social Media” at this year’s Digital Commonwealth conference.

The Digital Commonwealth welcomes these three exceptional new members to its Board of Directors!