Groundbreaking Online Library Intrigues Educators - Education -

"The launch of the Digital Public Library of America earlier this month creates new opportunities for schools to educate students, without a major technology upgrade. Almost three years in the making, the DPLA, the U.S.'s first public online-only library, allows free access to collections from university libraries, archives and museums. Previously, such collections could not be seen without going to the library that held them. The DPLA changes that, benefitting librarians -- but it also has special potential for educators.  The DPLA gives librarians an open platform, with tools that in principle will let them curate materials to help students in classrooms. For universities, the DPLA will help "scholarship will go faster," said Mary Molinaro, associate dean for library technologies at the University of Kentucky. She's been involved in a 15-year project to bring the UK library online, as manager of the Kentucky Digital Library. The UK library is one of the service hubs, or content aggregators, for the DPLA. Among other things, it will save researchers from having to fund trips to see materials that are in a specific place. A medieval researcher told her that many of the manuscripts he studies are now available online, meaning he had much quicker access to things he needed for his research, she said.  Molinaro believes the DPLA will improve education by allowing librarians to do things like geotagging maps so people can see what was written in a place, the newspapers it had, and whether there were oral histories taken of people in an area. 'Those are the kinds of things [you'll get] as you look at collections across the country, with open data coming together in a way will be magical,' Molinaro said ..."