{"id":7114,"date":"2013-02-28T15:39:46","date_gmt":"2013-02-28T20:39:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/dplaalpha\/?p=7114"},"modified":"2013-02-28T15:39:46","modified_gmt":"2013-02-28T20:39:46","slug":"press-building-the-digital-public-library-of-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dplaalpha\/2013\/02\/28\/press-building-the-digital-public-library-of-america\/","title":{"rendered":"Press: Building the Digital Public Library of America"},"content":{"rendered":"

“The Digital Public Library of America will launch on April 18 after two and a half years of careful planning and preparation. The project known as DPLA is the first national effort that seeks to aggregate existing records in state and regional digital libraries so that they are searchable from a single portal. Up until now, the documents that tell the story of our nation\u2019s history and cultural heritage have largely been siloed in state and local libraries, museums, and archives. Some institutions have the ability to digitize those valuable materials and put them online, but strained budgets mean that most do not.<\/span><\/p>\n

“The project\u2019s funding will also allow it to work with local communities to digitize their cultural-heritage\u2014preserving them for the future and bringing them online as part of our first national digital library.DPLA will bring together access to a diverse host of materials that were once stored on a patchwork of different websites, or not online at all, including newspapers, photographs, letters, newsreels, oral histories, manuscripts, books and public records. This could be a game changer for academic researchers and historians, who will be able to see more apparent connections between various local histories, perhaps for the first time. Students, teachers and amateur historians will be able to peruse DPLA\u2019s rich exhibits and learn about their own history and genealogy. And local communities will see their history preserved rather than lost to the deterioration of time.”The first step toward what will become the\u00a0Digital Public Library of America<\/a>\u00a0emerged from an October 2010 meeting at\u00a0Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study<\/a>. The project has been able to develop quickly in part it will provide linkages to existing content, not build a new collection. Emily\u00a0Gore<\/a>, DPLA\u2019s director of content, explains that it is “really building off of existing infrastructure to get this thing going.”<\/p>\n

“Six state digital libraries and one regional library collective will act as\u00a0The Digital Public Library of America<\/a>\u00a0service hubs, forming its core. These hubs already aggregate digital content from dozens, if not hundreds, of institutions within their areas\u2014from large universities to small, local historical societies. They bring to the\u00a0Digital Public Library of America<\/a>\u00a0not only their rich and diverse collections, but also their knowledge about how to execute large-scale, collaborative digital projects.<\/p>\n

“The\u00a0seven s<\/span>ervice hubs are currently working on normalizing their metadata to share with the\u00a0Digital Public Library of America<\/a>. Post-launch, the hubs will expand by bringing new content and partners into the national library and planning community outreach to get as many local groups as possible aware of and involved in the project.<\/p>\n

“The Digital Public Library of America<\/a>\u00a0will also launch in April with an impressive list of content hubs. While\u00a0Harvard University<\/a>\u00a0is the only content hub officially announced so far, \u00a0Gore<\/a>\u00a0anticipates that the\u00a0Digital Public Library of America<\/a>\u00a0will soon be able to confirm that the\u00a0Smithsonian<\/a>,\u00a0National Archives and Records Administration<\/a>,\u00a0New York Public Library<\/a>,\u00a0ARTstor<\/a>, and a few other large, academic libraries will have their materials ready in time for the April release.<\/p>\n

“DPLA leaders, including Gore and most of the service-hub directors, met in February at the Knight Foundation Libraries Conference, \u201cFrom Building Collections to Making Connections,\u201d to talk about the April launch and plan for challenges moving forward.<\/p>\n

“The group identified a number of issues they’re grappling with, including:<\/p>\n

\u00b7\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Accommodating all of the differences in metadata between digital collections.<\/strong>\u00a0Chris Vinson of the South Carolina Digital Library<\/a>\u00a0explains that, “there are so many different, unique infrastructures out there for digital libraries, and figuring out how to bring that all into one, monolithic place is going to be a real challenge.”<\/p>\n

\u00b7\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Dealing with materials that are not in the public domain.<\/strong>\u00a0The Digital Public Library of America<\/a>\u00a0may be founded on the idea of completely open access, but\u00a0Sheila McAlister of the Digital Library of Georgia<\/a>\u00a0says that every service hub is “dealing with materials that are not in the public domain” and that it will have to figure out “how do we balance that and get people the kind of content that they want.”<\/p>\n

\u00b7\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Deduplicating records after they\u2019re aggregated:<\/strong>\u00a0There will be duplicate metadata records from different repositories in the\u00a0Digital Public Library of America<\/a>\u00a0in April, John Butler of the\u00a0Minnesota Digital Library<\/a>\u00a0said, and the project will have to answer questions such as “How do we avoid letting that become a hit on a good user experience?” and “When we do de-duplicate\u2014how do we choose an authentic and best copy to save?<\/p>\n

\u00b7\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Sanding out data unevenness:<\/strong>\u00a0Not all metadata records are alike\u2014some may include the full text of a newspaper article, while others include only a small caption for an image.\u00a0Butler<\/a>\u00a0says that this will be a challenge as the project makes decisions about how those records are “treated by a search-engine algorithm so that discoverability across these objects is as good as it can be.”<\/p>\n

\u00b7\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Increasing digitization speed.<\/strong>\u00a0The\u00a0Digital Public Library of America<\/a>‘s\u00a0post-launch goal is for the service hubs to significantly increase their outreach efforts and community partnerships, and\u00a0Mary Molinaro of the Kentucky Digital Library<\/a>\u00a0says that means the service hubs “need to be able to manage that in a way where it’s not bottlenecked, where we can digitize really fast \u2026 [and] get it up online really fast, as well.”<\/p>\n

\u00b7\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Building a truly comprehensive digital library that provides a complete picture of America’s cultural history.<\/strong>\u00a0Central to its mission is the idea that it will truly be America’s digital library, which Gore believes means “making sure that we are broadly represented, every community has a stake in this \u2026 making sure that we have all kinds of content that meets the needs of all the communities who are interested in participating in this platform.”<\/p>\n

\u00b7\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Explaining it to the public:<\/strong>\u00a0McAlister<\/a>\u00a0worries that while “in the library community, there’s a lot of talk about DPLA \u2026 [it hasn’t] crossed into the general public as much.” The question of what the public will do with DPLA is a big one, and\u00a0Sandra McIntyre<\/a>\u00a0of the\u00a0Mountain West Digital Library<\/a>\u00a0says that it will have to work to convey: “What does it mean? What does each word in Digital Public Library of America mean?”<\/p>\n

\u00b7\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Sustaining the project into the future.<\/strong>\u00a0DPLA is currently funded through grants from Knight Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services, but it will ultimately need to find a means for sustaining itself or gaining federal funding, but Gore knows that “we have to have success before that.”<\/p>\n

“DPLA participants agree that the project is well positioned to expand and continue innovating after the April launch, despite these challenges, and that the possibilities for growth in local communities and across the nation are far higher than the hurdles.<\/p>\n

“McAlister<\/a>\u00a0said that the\u00a0Digital Library of Georgia<\/a>‘s affiliation will enable them to “work with institutions that are really strapped for resources to help them bring forward their own content and share it with a larger community.”\u00a0Molinaro<\/a>\u00a0echoed this sentiment, saying that the\u00a0Kentucky Digital Library<\/a>\u00a0is looking forward to “reaching out to communities and to libraries that really have no way to get their content online. They have great content, but just don’t have the ability to put it up, and nor would it be in a preservation repository.”<\/p>\n

“Some of the service hubs are looking to engage their communities in creative, new ways. The\u00a0Mountain West Digital Library<\/a>, for example, is talking about starting a “mobile scan-van service” that\u00a0McIntyre<\/a>\u00a0explains would allow people to “bring in their shoe boxes and informational materials to have them scanned \u2026 take a thumb-drive back home with them \u2026 but also share them with their local public library, their family history center, and with the\u00a0Mountain West Digital Library<\/a>, for sharing with DPLA audiences around the world.”<\/p>\n

“Many\u00a0service-hub directors said that they believe the project’s most exciting prospect is in how the general public will hopefully take the content and come up with innovative uses for it.\u00a0Molinaro<\/a>\u00a0says that, “once it is released, that’s where it’s going to be really exciting, to see what just regular people\u2014programmers out there, librarians out there, teachers out there\u2014will be able to do with this content.”\u00a0Butler<\/a>\u00a0agrees, saying “there could be different stories told because we have access to this large pot of data, and we can do whatever we want with it.”<\/p>\n

“By<\/em>\u00a0Annie Schutte,<\/em><\/a>\u00a0a librarian, teacher and consultant for Knight Foundation”<\/em><\/p>\n

From Annie Schutte’s post on the<\/em> The Knight Blog,\u00a0Building the Digital Public Library of America<\/a><\/p>\n<\/article>\n

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“The Digital Public Library of America will launch on April 18 after two and a half years of careful planning and preparation. The project known as DPLA is the first national effort that seeks to aggregate existing records in state and regional digital libraries so that they are searchable from a single portal. Up until […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5324,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7114","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dplaalpha\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7114","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dplaalpha\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dplaalpha\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dplaalpha\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5324"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dplaalpha\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7114"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dplaalpha\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7114\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7116,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dplaalpha\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7114\/revisions\/7116"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dplaalpha\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7114"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dplaalpha\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7114"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dplaalpha\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7114"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}