Please join us on Tuesday, June 4th for the 2019 Minnesota Digital Library Annual Meeting! This year's meeting will be at a new location, the Earle Brown Heritage Center in Brooklyn Center. We are pleased to welcome keynote speaker John Bracken, Executive Director of the Digital Public Library of America. His keynote will address DPLA's current projects and strategic direction for the future, including strengthening the cultural heritage network, expanding ebooks initiatives, and exploring opportunities to broaden DPLA's impact in advancing digital access to knowledge. Other topics for the day include OCLC's perspective on the digital library landscape, approaches to digital preservation, new collections management systems, community assessment, innovative ways to use your digital collection, and of course, an update from MDL staff.
Minnesota Digital Library News
Want to know more about rights statements? The rights statements project team has put together a new resource webpage, located in the Standards and Best Practices section of the MDL website. It contains an overview of the project, and access to a variety of training materials and resources.
Users of Minnesota Reflections may have noticed some changes to the database's metadata. Based on the recent work of the Rights Implementation Team, we have begun to change how we record and share the metadata associated with the rights to use and re-use items in Minnesota Reflections. These changes reflect the standard we have adopted, namely the work shared via RightsStatements.org. RightsStatements.org provides a set of standardized rights statements for digital cultural heritage heritage projects. In order to display this information, we have added some new fields to show the statement and the text that explains the statements.
Staff from both the Minnesota Digital LIbrary and Minitex headed to the American Swedish Institute on March 25, 2019 for a day of history, discussion, and collaboration at Minnesota History Whatever 3. Minnesota History Whatever is an annual gathering open to anyone interested in history - and welcomes teachers, museum professional, librarians, and archivists, as well as representatives from the performaing and visual arts.
The Minnesota Digital Library is pleased to announce an additional contribution to the Kanabec County Historical Society's collection in Minnesota Reflections. This new contribution of more than 30 photographs adds images of cities and towns in Kanabec County, including images of Main Street and bird's eye views.
We are so excited to announce the addition of our 190th partner to Minnesota Reflections. The Marshall County Historical Society joins 189 other organizations working to tell the story of the people, places, and experiences of the state of Minnesota.
Lake Superior Railroad Museum's new contribution increases their collection in Minnesota Reflections by more than 33%. Included in the project is a series of architectural drawings related to the construction of the Union Depot in Duluth. Today the train station is home to the Lake Superior Railroad Museum.
Want to be a presenter at the 2019 MDL Annual Meeting? The Minnesota Digital Library (MDL) annual meeting planning committee seeks proposals for 50-minute breakout sessions for this upcoming event, which will be held on Tuesday, June 4 at the Earle Brown Heritage Center in Brooklyn Center.
We're looking for feedback on future directions for the Minnesota Digital Library and Minnesota Reflections!
The Minnesota Digital Library (MDL) Governance Committee has been working through a strategic planning process over the past twelve months. Last year, Minitex completed an environmental scan of Minnesota Reflections and we conducted regional focus group workshops in St Peter and Duluth in May. Last summer, MDL Governance Committee members, Minitex staff, and other stakeholders spent two days developing draft goals, strategies and objectives.
Curious about standardized rights statements and how they might be used to describe the rights status of your digital collections? The combined MDL/Minitex and University of Minnesota project team has created a rights determination workflow document, a helpful guide which provides an approach to how the standardized rights statements from rightsstatements.org could be applied to individual items.
Historical content from Minnesota's cultural heritage organizations, all in one place