Last Thursday marked the close of the Digital Public Library of America Beta Sprint, an open call for code and concepts defining how the DPLA should operate. By the 11:59pm deadline, we had received nearly 40 final submissions ranging widely from digital storytelling projects to complex text annotation systems to new ways of searching library collections. The Beta Sprinters are a diverse group of non-profits, media organizations, academic and public librarians, students, government agencies, and interested individuals throughout the United States (along with a few participants from even further afield).
The Beta Sprint Review Panel will meet in mid-September to evaluate the submissions, but in the meantime, some of the sprinters have offered sneak peeks at their projects:
- Digital Collaboration for America’s National Collections: National Archives, Smithsonian Institution, Library of Congress
“For the purpose of the DPLA Beta Sprint, staff from the Smithsonian Institution, the Library of Congress, and the National Archives modeled a faceted search aggregator using the Smithsonian’s Enterprise Digital Asset Network (EDAN) as a starting point. As part of this proof of concept, a selection of records, with associated digital assets were drawn from the collections of the Library of Congress and the National Archives. Only a small set from the Library of Congress and National Archives were selected to test data mapping.” - Digital Inversion Theory: Principles for the Cooperative Organizing of Online Book Collections (PDF)
“With the relatively recent advent of the possibility for publishing texts online, librarians are potentially at another epochal time when basic theoretical frameworks for cooperative professional practice are due for re-examination and possible wholesale changes. This DPLA Beta Sprint submission provides a theoretical framework, digital inversion theory, for underpinning the planning of cooperative organizing practices for the existing network of librarians for the era of dynamic online texts.” - A Digital Public Library of America and the Transformation of the Humanities
“We focus in particular on how a Digital Public Library of America can provide a space in which 10,000 public libraries, 100,000 K-12 and 3,000 academic libraries interact in real time, with each institution contributing to this new space and at the same time better serving its traditional constituents.” - DLF/DCC: DPLA Beta Sprint
“Collections and institutions both provide valuable organizational and intellectual context that users need for interpretation and use of digital materials and navigation through large bodies of distributed content. Our project will look at ways aggregation services can create context and help with content recruitment for the DPLA.” - Federated Repositories and Providers
“The goal of this beta sprint was to consider the relationships between potential stakeholders and participants in the DPLA, and explore ways they might work together to build a sustainable model that facilitates long-term preservation of materials in addition to access.” - icfind
“I’m working on a prototype image collection finder, icfind. icfind is a tool to find collections of images from public libraries. Then, map the collections so you can see which images are from places near you.” - Image-Based Information Interoperability—Transcending a World of Silos
“Participants in the Digital Medieval Manuscript Interoperability Project, funded by the the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, have proposed and built an interoperable environment for digital manuscripts that separates repositories of images and metadata from the tools and applications used to access them, with the net effect of providing scholars with an open environment in which they can discover, view and manipulate these resources using their tool of choice.” - Index Data: Digital Public Library of America
“In order to provide a taste of how our technologies can be used, we have put together a simple interface which allows a user to search across several examples of the kinds of information sources that we discuss [here]…. Our interface employs a variety of methods to bring these resources together, including harvesting and indexing as well as broadcast searching using standard protocols, and public or proprietary APIs.” - mB3ok
“We developed a new organization of knowledge for public libraries which is mobile, digital, and physical. It serves the public in the modern day.” - Metadata Interoperability Services (MINT)
“MINT services compose a web based platform that was designed and developed to facilitate aggregation initiatives for cultural heritage content and metadata in Europe.” - Preparing for the Digital Public Library
“Essential Strategies proposes to make use of the enterprise conceptual data models contained in David C. Hay’s book, Enterprise Model Patterns: Describing the World, to create conceptual data models to support the DPLA’s efforts to automate a digital public library. The models fall into two categories:- A model of Information Resource, the artifacts managed by a typical library.
- A model of ‘the world’ that provides a basis for organizing the concepts described by or referred to by each Information Resource.”
- Use & Understand
“We are sure the DPLA will implement the services of find & get very well. To supplement, enhance, and distinguish the DPLA from other digital libraries, we propose the implementation of ‘services against text’ in an effort to support use & understand.”