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The Digital Commonwealth of Massachusetts is a portal to the rich cultural heritage held in museums, historical societies, colleges, libraries and other cultural repositories in Massachusetts. From this site you can search or browse the digital collections of member institutions throughout the state for manuscripts, images, historical documents, and sound recordings. The portal provides you with enhanced access and retrieval of information. Digital Commonwealth is currently developing a repository service that will be available to its members as a hosting option for digital content.
The Digital Commonwealth portal provides patrons search and browse capabilities to locate the rich digital resources held by member organizations 24/7 and world-wide. The portal contains the metadata that enables the discovery of digital presentations; it is comparable to an Internet search engine, which displays information about web pages and provides links to them but does not display the pages themselves.
The upcoming repository service offered by Digital Commonwealth will be a means to store and deliver digital content and associated metadata; this service will be offered to member institutions that wish to make selections of their collections available to the public via the World Wide Web. The repository’s technological infrastructure will provide access (user interfaces and displays) to the digital content. The metadata within the repository will be added to the Digital Commonwealth portal.
Over a hundred organizations are members of Digital Commonwealth.As more of our members contribute their holdings, the variety and quantity of searchable objects will increase, and the richer and more valuable this portal will become.
The Digital Commonwealth collects metadata about the objects, not the objects themselves; rights to the objects belong to their home institutions. For information about your rights to use these resources, see our copyright statement and consult the home organization for use policies and guidelines. Visit our FAQs to learn more about membership, technical requirements, planning for digitization and to see a list of our members.
Digital Commonwealth was initially funded by a federal Library Services and Technology Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services administered by the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners. The project was led by the Boston Public Library. Our portal was designed by SourceLab.