Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) opens to public

abernard102@gmail.com 2013-05-03

Summary:

"Gold paint glowing, there's an illuminated manuscript page from The Book of Hours, dated 1514. A gruelling photograph of the standoff between strikers and militia at the Bread and Roses strike of 1912 in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Black men marching, protesting against segregation in downtown Atlanta in 1960. Extraordinary accounts of the lives of Native Americans during the 19th century. The Digital Public Library of America has just launched, gathering together more than 2m items – books, photographs, manuscripts, art – from the country's libraries, archives and museums, and making them available to the public online for free ... A non-profit initiative, it has received millions of dollars of funding to digitise and bring together online the collections of the US's great libraries, as well as pieces and texts from regional museums and archives. 'One of the best things which people are discovering is that we have brought together lots of very small collections,' says Dan Cohen, executive director, who joined the project from a role as director of the Roy Rosenzweig Centre for history and new media at George Mason University. 'Yes, we have hundreds of thousands of items from the Smithsonian … but we've also worked with, for example, a historical society from Red Wing, Minnesota, who have amazing images of one of the first hot air balloon flights. It's completely fascinating – it's enabling people to find really incredible local history.'  The DPLA has also just announced a new partnership with the David Rumsey map collection, adding tens of thousands of historical maps and images to its online archive ... The main issue the DPLA is facing is copyright – just as Google did when it was sued by authors and publishers for its plans to digitise millions of books for Google Book Search, including in-copyright titles.  'Copyright is the biggest point of friction right now,' according to Cohen, 'particularly for certain kinds of things like books, where everything before 1923 is in the public domain, and from 1923 on you start running into barriers.' Cohen is working together with scholar, author and Harvard University librarian Robert Darnton, a key member of the DPLA's committee, to solve the issue. 'One of the things Bob and I are both really interested in is are there some creative ways we can think of getting more … books into the public sphere,' says Cohen. 'We want authors and publishers to make money, but the vast majority of books make most of their money in the first five years, then sit in copyright for the next 100 years. We think there might be creative ways to get more of those authors into the public sphere.'  One of these options could be an 'authors' alliance', where the author receives their rights back from the publisher after a certain amount of time, and can donate them to the DPLA if they want. 'Or a 'library licence', where a book could be under standard copyright protection for a certain period of time set by the publisher, five or 10 or 15 years, and after that the DPLA would get a gift of a single ebook copy, and we could host a version.' ..."

Link:

http://m.guardiannews.com/books/2013/may/02/digital-public-library-america-dpla

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.licensing oa.comment oa.libraries oa.museums oa.pd oa.glam oa.dpla oa.archives oa.libre oa.ch oa.copyright

Date tagged:

05/03/2013, 11:03

Date published:

05/03/2013, 07:03