digital commonwealth

Baseball Season Starts Now with your Library

Major League Baseball was set to open its season today, but it has been delayed as a result of the Covid-19 crisis. Even though the players won’t be taking the field, you can still get your baseball fix today through your Massachusetts library!

The Digital Commonwealth has an extensive collection of historic baseball photos taken by legendary Boston photographer Leslie Jones. Jones took photographs of the Red Sox and the Boston Braves throughout the mid twentieth-century, and captured many visiting players as well including Jackie Robinson. There is also baseball artwork, photos of the UMass Amherst baseball team, and other historic photos of the game being played in and around New England.Baseball is not only a game, it is the inspiration for numerous books, available at your fingertips through the Massachusetts eBook program LEA. New titles include Evie Drake Starts Over by Linda Holmes, a love story about “a woman who has lost her husband and a major league pitcher who’s lost his game,” The Resisters by Gish Jen, a story about a dystopian future where society is divided and baseball allows one young girl to cross that divide, and The Cactus League by Emily Nemens which “unravels the tightly connected web of people behind a seemingly linear game.” Classic baseball books available through LEA include Wait Till Next Year by Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Natural by Bernard Malamud, and Ball Four by Jim Bouton. Get started with LEA today by borrowing a book about baseball.

Filmmaker Ken Burns has allowed PBS to stream his renowned nine part documentary “Baseball” for free on its website. The documentary starts at the very origins of the game in the nineteenth-century and follows it up to the present day highlighting the unique aspects of the game and the personalities that have made it the nation’s pastime. The documentary is streaming for a limited time on the PBS website.Even though the umps won’t be yelling “play ball!” today, we can at least indulge in some photographs, books, and movies to hold us over until the baseball season officially begins.

It’s Always Baseball Season at Massachusetts Libraries

Opening Day is getting so close you can start to feel it; the days are getting longer, the snow is melting, and the air is getting warmer. Pretty soon we’ll be back to the pennant race, but for now there is still more time to wait until the first pitch.

To fill this gap, you can find books, pictures, newspaper articles and more from your local library to satisfy your baseball needs until opening day rolls around.

Because baseball is the sport that best lends itself to literature, reading may be the best way to get excited for the new season. Baseball has been the muse for countless authors since its earliest days as a sport. Concord resident and Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin’s memoir “Wait Till Next Year” tells her story of growing up in New York when the Dodgers, Giants, and Yankees all competed for the city’s loyalty. “Ball Four” is former Yankees pitcher Jim Bouton’s diary of the 1969 season as he tried to restart his career with the expansion Seattle Pilots as a knuckleballer. Bernard Malamund’s classic “The Natural” is probably more famous for its film adaptation starring Robert Redford, but the book (Malamund’s first) is just as good. All of these books and many more baseball classics can be found through the Commonwealth Catalog.

If the early history of the game is what piques your interest, you can find information and artifacts through Biblioboard’s baseball anthology. It has early rules, how to guides, pictures, and histories to educate and entertain you.

You can find more of Boston’s baseball history at the Digital Commonwealth. Search through old photos of the Red Sox, the Boston Braves, and the teams that have visited Boston to take on the hometown teams.

If all of this isn’t enough, and you just want to relive the recent Red Sox glory days, head over to libraries.state.ma.us and search through the archives of the Boston Globe to take yourself back to 2004, 2007, and 2013, and feel like you’re winning the World Series with the Sox all over again.

We hope that you enjoy these fun resources all season long as you kick back with some peanuts, Cracker Jacks, and root, root, root for your home team.

5 Things You Probably Didn’t Know Are In The Digital Commonwealth

The MBLC is now accepting applications for this year’s Town-Wide Preservation Assessment grant round. It’s an opportunity for Massachusetts libraries to work with a consultant to help them assess, organize, and ultimately digitize their historic and archival collections in the Digital Commonwealth.

Right now, there’s over 440,000 items from 130 participating institutions in this statewide digital repository. It’s a great tool for educators, historians, researchers, students, artists, authors – anybody with an interest in exploring the past through ultra-high resolution photographs, maps, letters, books, paintings, postcards, and more.

With so much content, there’s some bizarre and unexpected stuff tucked in as well. Below are five highlights from four of the most unique collections in the Digital Commonwealth.

1. Birdwing butterflies from the Solomon Islands, part of the Harry C. Belcher Lepidoptera Collection at Tufts Library in Weymouth.

2. Pheasant sculptures from the Castonguay Carved Bird Collection at West Yarmouth Library.

3. Food pouches from the Natick Soldier Systems Center Photographic Collection.

4. 1974 photo of the “Smithsonian Center for Short-Lived Phenomena” in Belmont, part of the Boston Public Library’s Spencer Grant collection. (By the way, this place actually existed – but fittingly enough, only from 1968-1975.)

5. Robot (ca. 1991) at the Natick Soldier Research, Development & Engineering Center. Also from the Natick Soldier Systems Center Photographic Collection.