The DPLA offers unprecedented opportunities for archives and special collections around the country to reach teachers, students, scholars and the general public. In “Using Large Digital Collections in Education: Meeting the Needs of Teachers and Students” (Digital Public Library of America, April 2015), Franky Abbott and Dan Cohen report that “DPLA’s value for education was two-fold: first as a one place to discover material from many collections, and second, because of this diversity, as a site with content to support local and underrepresented stories that students have not seen before.”
This presentation will report on two ongoing projects funded by the Boston Library Consortium (BLC) that encourage DPLA participation by member institutions and allow members to collaboratively digitize material on topics of hyper-local importance. The first project is a coalition of archives digitizing material to support the Boston Public School system’s new curriculum on school desegregation in the 1960s and 1970s. The goal is to form a robust research collection with materials from multiple institutions that will allow advanced students to delve deeply into the desegregation efforts of Boston’s African-American community and the after effects of Boston’s “busing” crisis. The other is a collaborative technical assistance project to support BLC members’ contributing digitized archival material to DPLA, in spite of wildly different infrastructure and internal practices and policies. In addition to describing the genesis, workflow and outcomes of each of these projects, the panelists will offer notes on their respective institutions’ hopes and plans for partnering with DPLA in sharing digital collections and developing curricular materials that serve their campuses and the wider community. After laying out these sample activities, the floor will be opened for what we hope will be a lively discussion of others’ experiences and wish lists related to DPLA’s potential role in education.
