“During the last two weeks, two major national events exploring the frontiers of e-publishing took place on opposite coasts of the U.S.\u00a0 On October 21, the\u00a0Digital Public Library of America\u00a0(DPLA) held its\u00a0first Plenary Meeting at the National Archives in Washington, D.C.\u00a0And on October 26-28, the\u00a0Books in Browsers\u00a0conference took place at the headquarters of the Internet Archive in San Francisco.<\/p>\n
“The DPLA event was built around the\u00a0six winners\u00a0of the DPLA’s\u00a0beta sprint competition\u00a0to identify ‘ideas, models, prototypes, technical tools, user interfaces, etc. . . that demonstrate how the DPLA might index and provide access to a wide range of broadly distributed content.’ \u00a0The DPLA also announced a\u00a0$5 million grant\u00a0from the Sloan Foundation and the Arcadia Fund to promote ‘an intense two-year grassroots process to build a realistic and detailed workplan for a national digital library, the development of a functional technical prototype, and targeted content digitization efforts.’ Jill Cousins, of\u00a0Europeana, the European Union’s digital library project, announced a partnership with DPLA focused on coordination between European and US libraries, museums and archives. The agenda of the plenary meeting can be found\u00a0here. A video of the entire event, as well as a variety of reports about it and documents from it, are available\u00a0here.\u00a0 The speakers at the event were, not surprisingly given the origins and scope of the DPLA process, largely from the worlds of libraries, archives (analog and digital), and academia.”<\/p>\n