by Rachael Allen
Outreach is an important facet in keeping the Digital Commonwealth running and developing, and Patricia Feeley has been on board for the past 3 years as a member of the Outreach and Education Committee—2 of those years as co-chair. The committee helps to build awareness of the services the repository provides, promotes the culturally rich collections held by institutions throughout Massachusetts, and engages communities in the creation and use of digital collections.
Patricia studied history as an undergraduate, then went on to earn a Master of Library Science degree at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. After graduating, Patricia worked for a short time organizing archival materials at the Northrup-King Seed Company in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and then moved to Massachusetts and began work at the Boston Public Library (BPL), where she has been for the past 30 years. She is currently the Interlibrary Loan Librarian there.
The Digital Commonwealth is a non-profit independent agency that hosts digital collections for cultural heritage institutions across Massachusetts, such as public libraries and historical societies. Participating institutions transfer their materials for digitization, which is provided by the BPL as a service to the Digital Commonwealth. The digital collections are made freely available online, and the institutions receive copies of the digital files for their own use. In some cases, if an institution already has large digitized collections but wants the content to reach a wider audience, the Digital Commonwealth harvests the metadata and links back to the institution’s website.
With its members dispersed throughout the state, the Outreach and Education Committee meets each month by conference call. The committee supports the Digital Commonwealth through outreach planning and programming, and is responsible for social media for all of the Digital Commonwealth, including Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
One of Patricia’s first projects on the committee was to write blog posts about staff at member institutions, calling them up to conduct interviews. And now, in addition to other social media posts, Patricia writes blog posts featuring various items or collections, such as this recent post on the very large photograph collection of Leslie Jones, a staff photographer at the Boston Herald-Traveler from 1917 to 1956.
While there are plenty of interesting and entertaining collections to highlight, Patricia strives to promote the collections for all of the Digital Commonwealth’s members, including institutions outside of Metro Boston and those with smaller collections. She also writes monthly posts about recent additions to the repository, which helps to ensure that each collection and institution has a chance to shine.
The committee develops a great deal of educational programming to reach out to prospective members and to widen the skills of member institutions. To get new institutions involved in the repository and aware of services provided, Digital Commonwealth staff travel around the state to present introductory workshops on digitization. The Digital Commonwealth also hosts more in-depth workshops for member institutions on topics such as creating online exhibits and digital storytelling.
To help spread the word about these workshops, as well as to highlight the benefits of membership in the Digital Commonwealth, the repository sends out notifications through the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioner’s AllRegions listserv, which reaches a wide audience of both institutions and individual cultural heritage professionals across the state.
Going forward, the outreach committee is aiming to add more digital resources to the Digital Commonwealth website, which would allow for members who are unable to attend workshops and programs in person to take advantage of the repository’s services. One aim is to record workshops and make the videos available on the website, as well as to hold workshops in the form of webinars.
Another aim is to add to the existing handful of lesson plans available on the website, which are provided by participating institutions to help educators incorporate the Digital Commonwealth’s collections into curricula. The committee hopes to gather additional lesson plans to include a greater variety of topics and educational levels, from elementary school to undergrad.
The committee is considering directing outreach more towards the general public going forward, underscoring the wealth of materials available in the repository. Often people associate the Digital Commonwealth with mainly visual media, such as photographs, but the repository also hosts a variety of other types of materials, including items like pamphlets and handwritten letters.
For those wishing to delve into the digital materials of Massachusetts’ cultural heritage institutions, a good place to start is the American Art Posters 1890-1920 collection on Golden Age illustration, which is Patricia’s favorite collection in the Digital Commonwealth.