Digital Public Library of America and Europeana Announce Collaboration

At the Digital Public Library of America plenary meeting on October 21, Europeana program director Jill Cousins announced that Europeana and DPLA have reached a mutual agreement to work toward interoperability, and thus potentially expand content access for users of both projects. In her announcement, she stressed the importance of openness—specifically, open data and open licensing—in digital libraries.

The DPLA/Europeana press release on the collaboration included the following “Statement of Common Principles”:

The Digital Public Library of America and Europeana share a common goal: to make the riches of libraries, museums, and archives available, free of charge, to everyone in the world. They will be guided in this mission by the following principles.

1. They will make their systems and data interoperable to the greatest possible extent.
2. They will promote open access to the greatest possible extent through joint existing and new policies concerning content, data, and metadata.
3. They will collaborate regularly in developing specific aspects of their systems, beginning with:

• an interoperable data model
• a shared source code
• cooperative collection building.

Cousins also announced a future collaboration between the two projects: a virtual exhibition, featuring freely available materials from DPLA and Europeana,on the subject of the migration of Europeans to the United States. No firm date was given, however, for when such an exhibition would be completed and accessible.

From the press release:

The DPLA and Europeana will demonstrate the potential of their combined collections by digitizing and making freely available material about the journey from the Old World to the New….Letters, photographs, and official records open up unfamiliar views into the harsh world inhabited by Europeans from the shtetl communities of Russia to the peasant villages of Ireland. And equally vivid testimonies illustrate the culture shock and hard lot of the immigrants after their arrival. Everyone in the United States, including Amerindians, descends from immigrants, and nearly everyone in Europe has some connection with migration, either within Europe itself or across the ocean. All will be invited to stroll digitally through this rich exhibition.