“If that moment was the Digital Public Library of America’s conception, then today is its birth, with the launch of DP.LA, the effort’s online home. I asked executive director Dan Cohen about what the DPLA had become in those intervening 20 months, and how he saw its role in American public life going forward. A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.”

Read the full article by Rebecca Rosen for The Atlantic here

Hennepin County Library bookmobile, 1971. Hennepin County [Minnesota] Department of Public Affairs, a member of the Minnesota Digital Library. All rights reserved.

The DPLA’s Pin of the Day is an image of the Hennepin County Library bookmobile. Hennepin County, home to Minneapolis and St. Paul, also accounts for 1/5 of the State’s total population. The county first commissioned its bookmobile, then a book wagon, in 1922; the bookwagon could transport books to rural schools, homes, and community centers, thereby  increasing access to reading materials across the county. As demand for the book wagon grew, the wagon itself changed, and the county adapted to a Model T Book Van in the 1930s, and the service grew to two new ton and a half Dodge trucks by the mid 1950s.

One of the DPLA’s two HistoryPin channels, the channel from which the Pin of the Day was selected, highlights the history of America’s libraries; now that the DPLA is launching a first iteration of its website, this look back at libraries past seems especially apt. Like the bookmobile, the DPLA is harnessing technological changes in order to eliminate the challenges to access posed by physical distance. In the same way that Hennepin County’s first book wagon revolutionized the ways in which people in rural areas accessed information, the DPLA can bring new and exciting resources to the people, but this time that increased access is being facilitated on a national scale, and without a horse-drawn wagon.

Take some time to check out the DPLA’s HistoryPin channel, and have a very happy National Library Week!

Featured Image: Hennepin County Library bookmobile, 1971. Hennepin County [Minnesota] Department of Public Affairs, a member of the Minnesota Digital Library. All rights reserved.

Excited? So are we! Check back soon for the brand new DPLA.

Cambridge, MA – The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) is pleased to announce the appointment of four new members to its Board of Directors. The Board supports the DPLA’s goal of creating and maintaining a free, open, and sustainable national digital library resource.

The four new members include renowned historians, librarians, and media studies scholars:

• Robert Darnton, Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and University Librarian at Harvard; Former DPLA Steering Committee member
• Jamie Hollier, President of Anneal, Inc.; Partner, Commerce Kitchen
• Amy Ryan, President of the Boston Public Library; Former DPLA Steering Committee member
• Siva Vaidhyanathan, Robertson Professor in Media Studies and Chair of the Department of Media Studies, University of Virginia

“Libraries are temples to the republic,” said Siva Vaidhyanathan, Robertson Professor in Media Studies and Chair of the Department of Media Studies at the University of Virginia. “They are where citizens seek guidance and connection with each other. The Digital Public Library of America has the potential to connect citizens all over the world to each other and to the best sources of knowledge through their public and school libraries. I can’t think of an organization I would be more proud to serve.”

“The Digital Public Library of America is creating a platform that will forever change the landscape of access to our nation’s culture, history, and knowledge,” added Jamie Hollier, President of Anneal, Inc. “I am honored to be able to apply my skills and expertise to this important work through the Board of Directors and look forward to working with all of the amazing individuals, organizations, and collections that are part of this endeavor. ”

Working closely with Dan Cohen, DPLA Executive Director, the Board seeks to fulfill the DPLA’s broad commitment to openness, inclusiveness, and accessibility, and it endeavors towards those ends in the best interest of its stakeholders, employees, future users, and other affected parties.

Full biographies of the entire DPLA Board of Directors can be found here.

NEW COMMITTEES ANNOUNCED

The DPLA is also thrilled to announce the formation of a new committee structure for the operational DPLA, slated to launch on April 18, 2013. The new committees—which fundamentally build upon the achievements of the planning initiative’s six original workstreams—are comprised of experts and leaders from a wide range of fields in private and public industry, government, academia, public and academic libraries, and other innovative sectors. Each committee will provide advice and recommendations to the DPLA in key areas of expertise.

The committees include:

• Advisory Committee
• Content Strategy Committee
• Legal Committee
• Marketing and Outreach Committee
• Technical Advisory Committee

Each committee is led by a small team of co-chairs. A group of 10-20 volunteer convening workstream members is responsible for seeking out and incorporating public input into the activities of the committee. Participation in all committees is open to the public.

Detailed descriptions of the new committees and its convening members are included below.

Advisory Committee

Composed of former Steering Committee members and others appointed by the Board of Directors, the Advisory Committee provides advice and recommendations to the Board of Directors on matters of concern and interest to the Advisory Committee, its members, and the DPLA in general. It deliberates on topics raised by other DPLA committees and crosscutting issues brought forth in public DPLA engagements, and it serves an important advocacy and community-building role.

The convening members of the Advisory Committee include:

• Carla Hayden, Enoch Pratt Free Library (Baltimore, MD)
• Charles Henry, Council on Library and Information Resources
• Michael Keller, Stanford University
• Deanna Marcum, Ithaka S+R
• Jerome McGann, University of Virginia
• Dwight McInvaill, Georgetown County Library (South Carolina)
• Peggy Rudd, Texas State Library and Archives Commission
• David Spadafora, The Newberry
• Doron Weber, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
• Michael York, New Hampshire State Library

Content Strategy Committee

The purpose of the Content Strategy Committee is to provide advice and recommendations to the Executive Director, Director for Content, and staff on matters pertaining to the DPLA’s long-term strategy for identifying and acquiring new content, partnering with data- and service-providing organizations, and other related matters. It also recommends guidelines on bibliographic data, metadata, interoperability, and international cooperation, in coordination with the Technical Advisory Committee.

The convening members of the Content Strategy Committee include:

• (Co-Chair) Emily Gore, DPLA
• (Co-Chair) Rachel Frick, Digital Library Federation
• Margy Avery, MIT Press
• Christine Borgman, GSE&IS, UCLA
• Peter Brantley, hypothes.is
• Susan Chun, Cultural Heritage Consulting
• Jill Cousins, Europeana
• Linda Crowe, Peninsula Library System
• Martin Gomez, University of Southern California Libraries
• Robert Darnton, Harvard University, DPLA Board of Directors
• Robin Dale, LYRASIS
• Betsy Kruger, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign
• Dwight McInvaill, Georgetown County Library (South Carolina)
• James Shulman, ARTstor
• Jena Winberry, Council on Library and Information Resources
• Jeremy York, HathiTrust

Legal Committee

The purpose of the Legal Committee is to inform the Board of Directors, Executive Director, and others about legal and copyright issues affecting equitable knowledge distribution in a digital world, including work toward better understanding and influencing digital lending, orphan works, international works, metadata ownership, strategies for tiered access, and dealing with vendors and materials under various kinds of restrictions. It also seeks to facilitate engagement with the broader legal community around legal issues relevant to the DPLA, digital libraries, and digital access in general.

The convening members of the Legal Committee include:

• (Co-Chair) Jim Neal, Columbia University
• (Co-Chair) Pam Samuelson, Berkeley Law School & School of Information
• Kim Dulin, Harvard Library Innovation Lab
• David O’Brien, Berkman Center for Internet & Society
• Jason Schultz, Berkeley Law

Marketing and Outreach Committee

The purpose of the Marketing and Outreach Committee is to provide advice and recommendations to the Executive Director, Director for Content, and staff on matters pertaining to the DPLA’s strategies for marketing and community outreach, including developing community engagement events, identifying new and existing modalities/channels for the DPLA to collaborate with organizations, and working to identify, describe, and target key institutional and personal end-user demographics. It also provides advice and recommendations to the Executive Director, Director for Content, and staff on matters pertaining to the DPLA’s strategy for identifying and partnering with content- and service-providing organizations, in collaboration with the Content Strategy Committee.

The convening members of the Marketing and Outreach Committee include:

• (Co-Chair) Carla Hayden, Enoch Pratt Free Library (Baltimore)
• (Co-Chair) Nate Hill, Chattanooga Public Library
• (Co-Chair) Peggy Rudd, Texas State Library and Archives Commission
• Rachel Bower, Scout Report
• Michael Colford, Boston Public Library
• Ginnie Cooper, Washington, DC Public Library
• Chris Freeland, Washington University in St. Louis
• Toby Greenwalt, Skokie Public Library
• Glen Hoptman, Lightbeam Group
• Andrew McLaughlin, betaworks
• Frances Pinter, Knowledge Unlatched
• Tom Sanville, LYRASIS
• Aaron Schmidt, Influx
• Maureen Sullivan, American Library Association 

Technical Advisory Committee

The purpose of the Technical Advisory Committee is to provide advice and recommendations to the Executive Director, Director for Content, and staff on matters pertaining to the DPLA’s long-term technical development, including ongoing development of the metadata platform, open API(s), front-end functionality, in-house and third-party applications, and other related endeavors. It also seeks to facilitate engagement and enthusiasm within the larger tech community around the DPLA platform and its related components.

The convening members of the Technical Advisory Committee include:

• (Co-Chair) SJ Klein, Wikimedia Foundation
• (Co-Chair) Martin Kalfatovic, Smithsonian Institution
• John Blyberg, Darien Public Library
• Soleio Cuervo, Dropbox
• Robert McDonald, Indiana University
• Carole Palmer, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign
• Robert Stein, Dallas Museum of Art
• Chuck Thomas, University System of Maryland and Affiliated Institutions Library Consortium
• Jill Vermillion
• David Weinberger, Harvard Library Innovation Lab
• Pamela Wright, National Archives and Records Administration

###

About the Digital Public Library of America

The Digital Public Library of America brings together the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world. It strives to contain the full breadth of human expression, from the written word, to works of art and culture, to records of America’s heritage, to the efforts and data of science. The DPLA aims to expand this crucial realm of openly available materials, and make those riches more easily discovered and more widely usable and used.

The tragedy took place right in front of the Boston Public Library, where we planned to have our gala launch on Thursday. I have been in touch with Amy Ryan, the President of the BPL, and I extended our sympathies to the BPL staff and their loved ones.

We have all been looking forward to this week’s festivities, to celebrate how thousands of people and institutions have come together to build the DPLA, to thank our incredibly generous contributors and funders, and to mark the DPLA’s transition from vision to reality.

Unfortunately, I no longer think it is possible to hold those events this week. The area around the BPL has been closed off, perhaps for several days, and it is not easy to relocate such a large-scale meeting. But logistics are the least of my concerns. People need time to mourn and to get resettled. Amy’s staff, like so many other honorable public servants in Boston, have to be there for the surrounding community first.

I am very sorry to those who planned to attend Thursday and Friday. Airlines and hotels have been forgiving about rescheduling; I hope by making this decision rapidly it will be possible for all attendees to rework their travel easily. For those of you with questions about this process, please see the DPLA launch section of this website.

I do not have the exact details yet, but we have already begun to plan an even larger event for the fall, one that will highlight our continued growth and emergence from the beta phase, and that also can serve as our first annual DPLAfest. This week’s event had been filled to capacity for weeks, with hundreds of people on the waiting list; we will use this time to see what we can do to accommodate even more people in the fall. We want to thank everyone for their great interest in the DPLA.

The new DPLA site will still go live at noon ET on Thursday as planned, and we look forward to sharing the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums. Although we have canceled all of the formal events, DPLA staff will be available all day online, and informally in person in the late afternoon in the Boston area (at a location to be determined), for those taking their first look.

I see the building of a new library as one of the greatest examples of what humans can do together to extend the light against the darkness. In due time, we will let that light shine through.

Urbana, Illinois / Cambridge, MA – The Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is joining with the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) to provide online access to thousands of historical materials archived at Illinois. As part of the cooperative partnership, the University Library will contribute metadata for 15 of its digital image collections.

Premier collections include the Motley Collection of Theatre and Costume Design (costume and set designs by the Motley Group, whose designs were used in productions on Broadway and the Metropolitan Opera in New York City); Portraits of Actors, 1720-1920 (includes almost 3,500 pictures of actors-studio portraits, the majority are British and American actors who worked between about 1770 and 1893); Historical Maps Online (maps charting the last 400 years of historical development in Illinois and the Northwest Territory); and Sousa Archives Music Instrument Digital Image Library (images of rare cornets and trumpets, early boxwood clarinets and flutes, unique double-reed sarrusophones, bassoons and Heckelphone, unusual harps and zithers, prototype electronic Hawaiian guitars and Sal Mar Construction, and Civil War era military horns in the Sousa Archives and Center for American Music).

“The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has been at the forefront of the movement to digitize our nation’s cultural and scientific heritage,” said John Palfrey, president of the Board of Directors of the DPLA. “We are honored and pleased to count Illinois as among the very first major participants in the development of the Digital Public Library of America. Their partnership and the unique materials that they are bringing to our national digital library initiative will have an immediate and lasting impact.”

“Contributing to the DPLA is a natural extension of our mission as the library of a major land grant university,” said Sue Searing, associate dean of libraries & associate university librarian for user services at Illinois.  “By contributing our records, we take another step forward in sharing Illinois’s digital treasures with the world.  And of course, our own students and researchers will benefit from the rich collection that the DPLA is shaping from multiple sources.  We’re proud and excited to be part of this groundbreaking initiative in knowledge-sharing.”

The DPLA is a large-scale, collaborative project across government, research institutions, museums, libraries, and archives to build a digital library platform to make America’s cultural and scientific history free and publicly available anytime, anywhere, online through a single access point. As part of its two-year Digital Hubs Pilot Project, the DPLA is working with several large digital content providers- including the National Archives, the Smithsonian Institution, and now the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign-and six state and regional digital libraries to make digitized content from their online catalogs easily accessible to all.

About the Digital Public Library of America

The Digital Public Library of America brings together the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world. It strives to contain the full breadth of human expression, from the written word, to works of art and culture, to records of America’s heritage, to the efforts and data of science. The DPLA aims to expand this crucial realm of openly available materials, and make those riches more easily discovered and more widely usable and used. More information is online at http://dp.la. To find out more about the DPLA launch, April 18-19 in Boston, visit http://dp.la/get-involved/events/launch/.

About the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library holds more than thirteen million volumes, more than 120,000 serial titles, and more than nine million manuscripts, maps, slides, audio tapes, microforms, videotapes, laser discs, and other non-print material.  The University Library is ranked highly nationally and globally, and its collections and services are used heavily by students, faculty, and scholars. More than one million items are circulated annually, and many more are used on site and virtually from anywhere in the world. For more information, please visit www.library.illinois.edu.

Image courtesy Jeffrey Keefer on Flickr; used under a CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 license. 

“Visitors will be able to view, for example, letters penned by George Washington, a copy of the Declaration of Independence in the handwriting of Thomas Jefferson, and ambrotype and daguerreotype images of Abraham Lincoln.”

“The Digital Public Library of America site dp.la will launch April 18 with more than two million objects — including digital renderings of photos, books, manuscripts and other items from places such as the Smithsonian Institution, along with museums, libraries and historical institutions around the country.”

An excerpt from The Economic Times, US digital library brings culture, history online

“The Digital Public Library of America launches next week and the University of Virginia is contributing the Holsinger Studio Collection to it. The collection is a photographic record of life in Charlottesville and Albemarle County from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.”

“”It’s both local and broader historical pictures so it has portraits of local community members of the time and including up to nearly 500 African-American portraits, but then it also has images from World War I,” said Bradley Daigle, UVA library director of digital services.”

“UVA library officials say they are excited to hop on board with the project, which has been in the works for years.”

Watch the video here

From Molly Balkenbush’s article and video posted on NBC29, UVA Contributes to The Digital Public Library of America

“Here’s what the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) hopes to do at launch:

In its first iteration, the DPLA will combine a group of rich, interesting digital collections, from state and regional digital archives to the special collections of major university libraries and federal holdings. The DPLA will demonstrate how powerful and exciting it can be to bring together our nation’s digitized materials, metadata (including catalog records, for instance), code, and digital tools and services into an open, shared resource.

[....]

The platform will serve as the central nexus for a group of “hubs.” These hubs are nationwide organizations that provide essential services and content for the DPLA. Presenting a geographically and historically diverse look at our nation’s archives, the seven initial service hubs span the United States: the Mountain West Digital Library (Utah, Nevada, and Arizona), Digital Commonwealth (Massachusetts), Digital Library of Georgia, Kentucky Digital Library, Minnesota Digital Library, South Carolina Digital Library, and Oregon Digital Library. Each of these organizations assists an even greater number of local and regional libraries, museums, and archives with digitization efforts, creating a broad network of contributors and a vast range of content that users can access.

(Read the rest at their site, dp.la)”

An excerpt from Kevin Eagan’s article for Critical Margins, Digital Public Library of America Launches April 18