Hacking the Digital Public Library of America | National Day of Civic Hacking

"The Digital Public Library of Americabrings together the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world. It strives to contain the full breadth of human expression, from the written word, to works of art and culture, to records of America’s heritage, to the efforts and data of science. The DPLA aims to expand this crucial realm of openly available materials, and make those riches more easily discovered and more widely usable and used. In addition to serving as a vital content portal for students, teachers, scholars, and the public – recently ranked a top 50 Best Website of 2013 by Time Magazine – the DPLA is also a powerful platform that enables new and transformative uses of our digitized cultural heritage. By offering programmatic open access to over 2.4 million records from American libraries and cultural heritage institutions, software developers, researchers, and others can create novel environments for learning, tools for discovery, and engaging apps that will shape the way Americans search for, interact with, and build upon our shared cultural heritage ... Using our RESTful API and maximally open data, developers are tasked with the challenge of creating interesting visualizations, data enhancement/enrichment tools, mapping applications, and other creative applications using the DPLA’s dataset of over 2.4 million records of digitized cultural heritage from our nation’s libraries, archives, and museums. There are no strict boundaries on what you might develop, except that they be open source and interoperable with the DPLA platform ..."