“Battle flags never made sense to me. ‘Why give your opponents something to shoot at?’, was my thinking. As if soldiers with deadly weapon would bother rally to a flimsy piece of cloth. An idea. What’s powerful about that?
“Friday, I attended the plenary session that launched the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) at the National Archives in Washington DC. (with 300 others!) When it started early this year, I was pretty skeptical of the DPLA. It had no discernible plan of action, no coherent vision for the future of libraries, no business model, not even an awareness of how impossible its dream really was. All they had was… a battle flag, and a figurative one, at that.
“What I saw was the power of a battle flag. John Palfrey and a cabal of Harvard academics have forged a movement from the fire of frustrated librarians, archivists, and information professionals who have recognized that a lot of the present system is broken and going nowhere fast. They sent out a call for help, and amazingly enough, that call was answered.”
From Eric Hellman’s post on Go To Hellman, The DPLA Muster