In a June 25 session at the ALA Annual conference in Orlando, John Bracken, VP of media innovation for the Knight Foundation, said that the foundation has been focused on three key questions when working with libraries: What can be done to foster cross-discipline collaboration, possibly learning from projects in other civic sectors such as Code for America, 18F, or the Knight-Mozilla OpenNews collaboration; how can community be put “even more robustly” at the center of the foundation’s work; and how can the foundation help libraries tell their stories to wider audiences? “To succeed, particularly in a time of reduced public investment, it is vital to tell our stories in ways that people can understand the breadth of our work, and on platforms” where the public is present and listening, Bracken said.
Digital Public Library of America Seeks Educator Advisors
If you’re a humanities educator who works with students in grades 6 through college, the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) wants to hear from you. With a $96,000 grant, DPLA is seeking applicants to join an Education Advisory Committee to create resources to support student research.
Begins Today: A HathiTrust and DPLA Partnership
From the DPLA Blog: The HathiTrust Digital Library will partner with the recently launched Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) to expand discovery and use of HathiTrust’s public domain and other openly available content.
Librarians Respond to DPLA Launch
Launched yesterday, the Digital Public Library of America’s portal offers browsing and search access to a still growing aggregation of cultural heritage records from dozens of US cultural heritage institutions. At the same time, DPLA began offering programmatic access to its metadata stores, urging developers to create their own interfaces and access points to the collections. First impressions have been almost uniformly positive, though many have suggested avenues for further enhancements and refinements.
What is the DPLA?
The question that has most frequently come up in the course of the two-year planning process for the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) has been a very simple one: What is it?
Since April 2010, the planning initiative has taken the form of an extended, national design phase to plan out what we should build together. The emphasis of this process has been to solicit diverse views as to what the “it” should be that we are working toward.
Q&A: Dan Cohen on His Role as the Founding Executive Director of DPLA
The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) last week appointed Dan Cohen as its founding Executive Director. LJ caught up with him to discuss his work as Director of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, and his plans for DPLA.
Why We Miss the First Sale Doctrine in Digital Libraries
In this article, the fourth installment in a series on the initiative to build a Digital Public Library of America, I examine the underlying role of law in the ebook lending debate, explore potential solutions to the problems, and consider how the DPLA can contribute to solutions for those we serve. At the core of this issue is the way the copyright law works–or doesn’t–when it comes to books, libraries, and readers in the United States today and into the future.
Innovative Interfaces Announces Plans to Integrate DPLA into Encore, and Launches Decision Center
Innovative Interfaces Inc. today announced a new development initiative that will integrate access to the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) into its Encore Synergy platform. Separately, the company announced today that its Decision Center collection management solution has been implemented at several public and academic libraries, including Jefferson County Public Library (CO), Tulsa City-County Library (OK), and University of Nebraska, Lincoln.
The DPLA and School Libraries: Partners Focused on Digital-Era Learners
If we build it well, a Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) can help school libraries meet the information needs of students even as local budgets shrink. The DPLA can provide important resources to the partnership between library-based and classroom-based teachers, especially during this period of rapid change in education, in libraries, in technology, and in the world of information generally.
What the DPLA Can Mean for Libraries
One of the concerns expressed about the planning initiative to create a Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) is that its very existence might threaten public libraries. While I credit this fear—no outcome to this initiative could be worse—the DPLA is designed to do precisely the opposite: to establish a platform and resources that will help libraries and other cultural heritage institutions, both public and private, to succeed in a digital era.
