New Library Resident

Late last spring, the Massachusetts Studies Project (MSP) began to share office space on the 5th floor, in order to collaborate more closely with Curriculum Resource Center on educational initiatives and with the Healey Library Archives on issues around the cultural heritage materials we're documenting.

Joanne Riley is the director of the MSP, which is part of the Institute for Learning and Teaching in the Graduate College of Education here at UMass and is co-sponsored by the Healey Library, along with the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities.

The mission of the MSP is to ground educators and students in their own communities through local history, local culture and local environmental studies.  One initiative of the MSP, managed by Heather Cole, is the Mass. Memories Road Show. It is a cultural heritage project where Massachusetts communities are visited, and people are invited to share photos and stories. The photos are scanned and the stories are recorded at a public event, then everything is added to an online database. The goal of the project is to visit all 351 communities in Massachusetts.