DPLA: A Look Back on the Last 5 Years | Digital Public Library of America

"Five years ago today, we launched the Digital Public Library of America. We rang the bell inside a small conference room at Harvard’s Berkman Center as dp.la went live with 2.4 million items. The aggregated collections came from six Service Hubs representing the states of Georgia, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Minnesota, South Carolina, and one multi-state collaborative representing the Mountain West. Individual institutions that were a part of the launch as Content Hubs included the National Archives, the Smithsonian Institution, the New York Public Library, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and the University of Virginia.

The Digital Public Library of America grew out of a series of community conversations and a planning process led by the Berkman Center and quickly became a reality with the launch on April 18, 2013. At that time, DPLA had only four full-time staff, Dan Cohen, Emily Gore, Amy Rudersdorf, and Kenny Whitebloom. Between us, we poured countless hours of metadata wrangling, partner recruitment and communications, contractor negotiations and feedback, outreach and press contacts, fundraising, and shared visioning into creating the first US national digital library...."