Month: April 2019

Posted on

Meet Dr. Stephen Kenney, Commonwealth Museum Director

by Rivi Feinsilber

Dr. Stephen Kenney is the Museum Director of the Commonwealth Museum right here in the state of Massachusetts. He earned his PhD in International Relations from Boston University and started his career as a faculty member, administrator, and grant writer in higher education, most notably as Interim President at Quincy College. From there, he joined the Commonwealth Museum and became the director a year later, staying in the position for the last twenty years. His tenure at the museum involves advocacy through administrative tasks such as supervising staff and raising money, but his major duty is outreach through planning and executing events and exhibits that showcase the collections that teach the public the history of Massachusetts in and outside the museum.

Commonwealth Museum gallery

The Commonwealth Museum, free and open to the public, tells the story of the state of Massachusetts. Dr. Kenney stated the museum fulfills this mission by conducting educational and cultural programming using the material held in the Secretary of Massachusetts, mainly to school groups. These groups are a daily occurrence, offering a free bus to low-income schools that removes financial barriers that prevent learning and important foot-traffic for the museum. The children experience the most breathtaking if not also the most important exhibit, the Treasures Gallery, an interactive permanent exhibit that

Commonwealth Museum Treasures Gallery

features the museum’s most important objects such as the colony’s Royal Charter and Paul Revere’s rendering of the Boston Massacre. However, Dr. Kenney also targets the general public by stepping outside the museum virtually and in-person. The institution uses Facebook and Twitter to promote past, current, and future events and exhibits. Dr. Kenney also presents at rotary clubs and historical societies to draw more people in as well as creating lobby exhibits that double as traveling ones. Another avenue of recruiting potential patrons and colleagues is participating with outside associations such as attending the annual conference of the New England Museum Association and belonging to the board of the Partnership of the Historic Bostons, an international non-profit organization celebrating the two Bostons, here and in England. For the latter, he helps plan lectures and finds a venue for them, which highlight different aspects of the 17th century. The museum’s programs do not only focus on the earlier years of the state, but historical events through the centuries.

Continuing reaching out to the public and working with outside organizations, he helped plan the reenactment of “I Want to Go to Jail,” at the State House on February 24th of this year; a play that tells the story of the women suffragists’ challenges in getting the 19th amendment passed. He continues teaching and celebrating this integral part of women’s history by working with the Women’s Suffrage Celebration Coalition of Massachusetts to celebrate the 19th amendment with “Suffragist of the Month” from now until 2020. He is also thinking about creating an exhibit that illustrates the histories of the first two colonies, Plymouth and Mass Bay as the anniversary of Plymouth’s founding is occurring next year. Participating in and working with these organizations fulfills his outreach and advocacy philosophy of having a reciprocal relationship with organizations and other institutions; help others and they will help you. He brings this within the walls of the museum as well.

The museum also uses the same reciprocal relationship philosophy by hiring college/university student workers through co-op and student worker programs. For the former, the museum works with Northeastern acquiring two students every six months and hiring four to five students from University of Massachusetts Boston for work-study. The students get to learn the process of creating and executing museum programs and the museum gets extra hands that help the small staff of four reach out and teach the public through their collections.

While all of this gets people in the door, it cannot happen without advocating for funds. While it is a state museum, and therefore overhead is covered, the museum still needs money for these outreach programs. Museums struggle to obtain funding to keep the doors open, let alone conduct outreach. This is where Dr. Kenney stated his grant writing in higher education comes in handy; he successfully acquired a grant during the 2008 recession for a four million dollar exhibit. Raising funds is not his primary role as director, but earning grants and other monetary resources serves the public by securing the necessary resource for exhibits, lectures, presentations, and other events.

The hard work pays off as the director relayed that he enjoys the work he performs and appreciates the opportunity the job offers of meeting interesting people from all fields, from documentary makers to historians. For up and coming museum professionals, he advises for them to be flexible, so while you might not end up with the exact job you had in mind, you’ll find a fulfilling one with the same interests and skills.

Posted on

Meet Stacie Williams, Director of the Center for Digital Scholarship at the University of Chicago

by Ashley Williams

From copy editor to Director of the Center for Digital Scholarship at the University of Chicago, Stacie Williams has had an exciting career journey filled with achievements and accolades. Stacie graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a B.A in journalism in 2001. She has written for a number of prominent organizations including, the Chicago Reporter and Chicago Defender. Her writing interests include studies on race and social justice– topics she has published on and been awarded for.

Stacie eventually took a job at the Newberry Library in Chicago, inspiring her to apply to Simmons’ Archives Management program. She graduated with her M.A. in Library Science in 2011. As a library professional, she has served as the keynote speaker for multiple conferences geared toward digital librarianship and been elected chair of the Nominating Committee for the Society of American Archivists. She also volunteered to be a part of the team of archivists that worked on A People’s Archive of Police Violence in Cleveland.

Stacie’s journey back to Chicago, where she grew up, started with a desire to be closer to her parents. I asked her what about the position attracted her aside from family concerns. She informed me that since its founding in 1890, UChicago has been at the forefront of developing how we study social sciences– a range of studies that have always been close to her heart and research. The University is also located in the heart of urban Hyde Park, where Barack Obama lived while teaching for the University’s Law school for 12 years. This would allow Stacie to further her research and involvement in race and social justice by facilitating collaboration by facilitating collaboration with affording organizations like the Black Metropolitan Research Consortium.

Stacie’s primary responsibilities at UChicago include coordinating workshops and related services for data service librarians and being a consultant for data management options for faculty and staff. She also manages UChicago’s digital scholarship repository, Knowledge@Uchicago and is on the library’s digital collections working group. As Director, Stacie primarily serves the faculty of UChicago. She spends a great deal of her time helping faculty members decide how and where to preserve their data. Much of this is done in an effort to advocate for open access. This means that instead of selling their work to a journal that will charge the public for access, Stacie encourages faculty to add their scholarship to UChicago’s digital repository where it can be accessed for free. When asked who she could serve more, Stacie lamented that she wishes she could do more for UChicago’s undergraduate students. She also noted that graduate students are often more open to ideas like open access than senior faculty might be and furthermore are creating the scholarship of tomorrow.

Stacie also supports and promotes several outreach programs related to data management for Uchicago’s library. Most recently, the library participated in Love Data Week. This is a week long campaign (typically the week of Valentine’s Day) that schools across the nation participate in designed to raise awareness about data management and preservation. For this week, the social science data librarian coordinated 5 workshops centered around open data and data justice. My favorite workshop was called “A Date with Data.” This workshop welcomed students and faculty to partake in cake and button making while learning about what data services the library provides. There was also an opportunity to win a gift card!

While Stacie is dedicated to the college community she serves, she also thinks a lot about the community outside of UChicago’s campus. At work she often asks herself, “How does this affect the person standing on the bus stop at the edge of campus?” Because of this she also involves herself in outreach programs off-campus. This past October,  Stacie and a group of other African American archivists partnered with the Honey Pot Performance collective to host a major community archiving project around house music, a genre that was born in Chicago. The event included panelists, rooms for oral histories to be creates, tech for on-site digitization, and, most importantly in Stacie’s opinion, food! You can’t expect people to participate in a community event without feeding them, Stacie says. This project was meaningful to some of Chicago’s marginalized populations, since house music grew out of queer black communities on the city’s South Side. The project resulted in a mapping project that was able to chart the history of house music throughout Chicago, bringing Stacie’s desire to serve her off-campus community full circle.