Public Conference to Showcase Innovative Ideas for the Digital Public Library of America

Cambridge, MA—On October 21, 2011, the first Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) conference will bring together government leaders, librarians, technologists, makers, students, and others interested in building a national digital library at the National Archives in Washington, DC. Conference participants will share their visions for the DPLA effort and explore multiple points of entry for public participation in the initiative’s work.

Registration for the conference is free and open to the public, to support the DPLA’s goals of building a “big tent” coalition and including broad and diverse voices in the conversation. Those interested in attending can register online at http://dp.la/get-involved/events/oct2011plenary/.

The conference will feature presentations from nine promising entries selected from summer 2011’s Beta Sprint, an open call for code and concepts defining how a national digital library might operate. These projects range widely from full prototypes for an online library interface to innovative digital storytelling tools to unique visualization mechanisms for digital collections. Groups to present include the Library of Congress, the National Archives, the Smithsonian Institution, the Harvard Library Innovation Lab, metaLAB (at) Harvard, the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, and the Wikimedia community, among others. A full list of submissions, including interactive demos, is available at the DPLA’s new website, http://dp.la/.

Speakers include David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States; Deanna Marcum, Associate Librarian for Library Services at the Library of Congress; Susan Hildreth, Director of the Institute for Museum and Library Services; Brewster Kahle, Founder of the Internet Archive; Jill Cousins, Executive Director of the Europeana Foundation; and Carl Malamud, President of Public.Resource.Org.

The conference will be streamed live with closed captioning.