The Digital Public Library of America: Collaboration, Content, and Technology at Scale (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE.edu

"The vision of a national digital library has been circulating among U.S. librarians, scholars, educators, and technologists since the early 1990s. Efforts led by a range of organizations—such as the Internet Archive, HathiTrust, and others—have successfully built resources that provide books, images, historical records, and audiovisual materials to anyone with Internet access. Scores of institutions have digitized vast numbers of materials held in U.S. libraries, archives, and museums, making available a shared cultural heritage in ways unimaginable not so long ago. However, these digital collections often exist separate from one another, with each offering its own interfaces, search mechanisms, and underlying data structures. Starting in 2010, leaders from libraries, foundations, academia, and technology agreed to work together to create 'an open, distributed network of comprehensive online resources that would draw on the nation's living heritage from libraries, universities, archives, and museums in order to educate, inform, and empower everyone in the current and future generations.'1 The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), which launched on April 18, 2013, with lead funding by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, unites these disparate collections, providing open and coherent access to the country's digitized cultural heritage. As of this writing, DPLA has over 7 million items, a number that grows every week. It displays them through its portal and also redistributes those items through its platform, which includes an API (application programming interface) and open data. DPLA normalizes and enhances the records of contributing institutions so that they can be commingled and made more easily discoverable through innovative interfaces. For instance, DPLA provides geocoding (latitude and longitude) for as many items as possible. This means that users can browse and search DPLA's unified collection through its map, which is not possible elsewhere. Researchers can also browse using the timeline, virtual bookshelf, and faceted search tools. In addition, teachers and students can save and share customized lists of their favorite items and explore curated digital exhibitions on subjects of national significance. Developers enjoy complete access to the full collection via the API and a bulk download page, and they have responded by building a range of apps, demonstrating how the role of a digital library can be much more than a simple storehouse of, and interface for, digital collections. For instance, Culture Collage allows users to search DPLA image holdings and display the results as a dynamic river of images from which users can save their favorites into a Pinterest-style page. Other apps offer easy DPLA integration with landmark web services, such as FindDPLA for Wikipedia and WP DPLA for WordPress. OpenPics, a smartphone app, utilizes the phone's GPS signal to show DPLA materials that come from the area around a user. All of these DPLA-powered apps can be found in the ever-expanding app library ..."