Digital Public Library of America » Blog Archive » Digital Public Library of America makes push to serve all 50 states by 2017 with $3.4 million from the Sloan and Knight foundations

"The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) is on the way to connecting online collections from coast to coast by 2017 – an effort boosted by a new $3.4 million investment, comprising $1.9 million from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and $1.5 million from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. These two new awards, coupled with significant earlier support from the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the National Endowment for the Humanities, will allow DPLA to open new Service Hubs that provide a way for all cultural heritage organizations across the country to connect through one national collection. The Digital Public Library of America brings together the riches of America’s libraries, archives and museums, and makes them freely available to the world. DPLA provides public access to more than 10 million items – including the written word plus works of art and culture – from 1,600 institutions.  This series of investments represents a significant milestone in the development and growth of DPLA’s Service Hubs. These Services Hubs are state or regional digital collaboratives that host, aggregate or otherwise bring together digital objects from libraries, archives, museums and other cultural heritage institutions in their state or region. At the library’s launch in 2013, DPLA represented a collaborative of 16 major partners, covering nine states. The number has since doubled to more than 20 states, and is on the way to 50 in the next two years. As thousands of digital collections have been brought together through DPLA’s platform, fascinating new projects and tools using America’s cultural heritage have emerged, including curated exhibitions on historical topics and eras,dynamic visualizations and other cutting-edge apps, community engagement opportunities at an international scale, and much more.  These new grants will accelerate the growth of the Hubs program so that all collections and item types in America can easily be a part of DPLA ..."