National digital library gains traction | Harvard Gazette

"For a 6-month-old, the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) already has grown quite large: from an initial 2.4 million available items in April to more than 5 million. Fame came fast too, “even in our infancy,” said DPLA Executive Director Dan Cohen. This free online portal into American culture was less than three weeks old when Time magazine named it one of the best 50 websites of the year. DPLA is an enormous free public library under a digital roof. With a few clicks of computer keys, users can access millions of links to online books, photographs, movies, and other cultural artifacts from collaborating institutions, including digital collections at the Harvard Library. Member libraries, museums, and exhibits contribute links for digitized materials — 'metadata' — to nine regional or state aggregators, called service hubs. Twelve such contributors, each with 250,000 items or more, are content hubs that provide metadata directly to DPLA, which is a metadata repository rather than a repository of images, books, or any other physical content. Early partners were already busy gathering digital data for the future of libraries. The participants include the Library of Congress, HathiTrust Digital Library, and Internet Archive. Late last week, in a two-day meeting, 700 librarians from across the United States and a few from Europe gathered in Boston to see what was new, and to see what was ahead for DPLA. (Donating venues were the Boston Public Library, Northeastern University College of Social Sciences and Humanities, and Simmons Graduate School of Library and Information Science.) One new aspect was a nearly $1 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to underwrite digital training for local librarians. (About 1,700 local libraries are plugged into DPLA so far.) Also new was the fact that three data-aggregating partners signed on in New York, North Carolina, and Texas. And DPLA has added features, including StackLife, a digital browsing tool developed at Harvard that allows a user to see at a glance the popularity of a given book ..."