Meet the NMRLS Committees

We completed the profiles of the NMRLS staff with the jun Newsletter issue. We begin a new series of profiles with this issue on NMRLS Committees! What Committees are there? What do they do? Do they have any fun at all or is all just work work work?

We continue our series with the Digital Library Committee!

Seated left to right: Chair Jim Keenan, Systems Librarian, Billerica Public Library; Vicki Yablonsky, Library Media Specialist, North Reading High School; Ronald Gagnon, Executive Director, NOBLE, Danvers; Mary Rose Quinn, Director, Stevens Memorial Library, North Andover (Not present: Lawrence Rungren, Executive Director, MVLC, Andover)

Charge: to set goals and objectives, recommend budgetary, standards and policies, and evaluation criteria

The committee receives and reviews reports on progress of the statewide digital library, The Digital Commonwealth <http://www.digitalcommonwealth.org>. Mary Rose Quinn has stepped down after being Chair; Randy Robertshaw of Tyngsborough has been invited to join the committee.

The Digital Commonwealth launched its portal at a September 2007 Conference in Worcester attended by nearly 300. The portal provides access to ten digital repositories. These repositories, including NMRLS, host digital content for dozens of individual institutions. The portal's sophisticated indexing system pulls together content that now exceeds over 15,000 digital objects. The portal allows the end user to search all of these repositories simultaneously.

The Digital Commonwealth also hosts a repository for members digital assets. NMRLS has loaded the holdings from five member libraries to this repository.

The Digital Commonwealth is open to all Massachusetts cultural institutions.

For the full roster of the Committee, please visit: http://www.nmrls.org/about/committee.shtml#dig