Press: Hack the humanities: The Digital Public Library of America is coming

“The humanities aren’t typically associated with programmers and engineers, but a wave of startup innovation may be be coming to fields such as history and art thanks to a project called the Digital Public Library of America.”

“The online library is a massive, years-long effort to digitize and connect the collections of libraries, archives and museums across the U.S. Its mission is to unlock a rich trove of historical and cultural data—including documents, photographs, artwork, maps and audio—digitized, archived and easily searchable thanks to rich metadata.”

“Opening up the potential for anyone with a Web connection to hack the humanities.”

“Once collections are folded into the Digital Public Library’s database, they will be geo-coded, time-lined and tagged with rich search information, meaning users can quickly draw connections between far flung materials that would have been impossible before.”

“Dan Cohen—the library’s founding executive director—was in Manhattan’s East Village Thursday night at the Humanities Initiative at NYU to promote the library’s launch in two weeks. Cohen stressed that researchers, journalists, programmers and others would be free to come up with their applications for the data via the library’s freely available API.”

“”If you want, you will be able to download the whole thing,” Cohen told a group of mostly students and academics. “Anyone that wants will be able to create revolutionary new tools.”"

“And yes, that includes commercial uses Cohen told Upstart Business Journal after the talk. Cohen said that app makers could use the information in the library to say, offer virtual walking tours that link historical photographs with the user’s location.”

From Alan Dalenberg’s article for Upstart Business Journal, The Digital Public Library of America is coming