Digital Public Library of America » Blog Archive » Digitization partnerships with Minnesota Public Libraries

"The Minnesota Digital Library (MDL) is one of four DPLA Service Hubs to be sub-awarded a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, through the DPLA, for the Public Library Partnership Project (PLPP).  The purpose of PLPP is to develop a curriculum for teaching basic digitization concepts and skills and pilot it through workshops for public library staff, encourage and facilitate their participation in their local digital libraries and DPLA, and create collaborative online exhibitions based on materials digitized through this project. At the end of PLPP, we will also be sharing a self-guided version of the curriculum we built. MDL was very pleased with the success of our implementation of the first stage of PLPP—we offered four digital skills training sessions to thirty-one individuals from twenty-two different public libraries and collaborating historical societies around Minnesota.  The training was so well received that we hope to incorporate similar basic group training sessions into our ongoing recruitment and preparation of potential participants. We are now deep into the second phase of the PLPP in which the organizations propose projects, select appropriate materials from their collections and send them to us for digitization and metadata preparation. An early success was the contribution of a 1930 plat book of Polk County by the Fosston Public Library, the first organization to contribute to MDL from this county ..."