Building a Digital Public Library of America - The Digital Shift

abernard102@gmail.com 2012-11-28

Summary:

Above the front doors of the Boston Public Library (BPL) appear the words: “Free to all.” These three words face Copley Square and, beyond that, Trinity Church, the Massachusetts State House, and eventually Boston Harbor, our city’s historic gateway to the markets of the world. The Boston Public Library, America’s first publicly funded municipal library, will host a celebration in April, 2013 to launch, officially, a project that is based upon these same three words. The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) is an ambitious, broad-based effort to establish a new library platform for our digitally-mediated age. The planning for a DPLA began in October, 2010, when thirty people, representing a range of disciplines, met at the Radcliffe Institute in Cambridge, MA, to talk about whether we might work together to establish a national digital library for our country.  At the end of the meeting, everyone agreed to a single sentence: to work toward 'an open, distributed network of comprehensive online resources that would draw on the nation’s living heritage from libraries, universities, archives, and museums in order to educate, inform and empower everyone in the current and future generations...'   In its first iteration, the DPLA will bring together digital resources that are today distributed around the country and make them easily accessible and useful. Today, digital library materials are scattered in ways that no single librarian or patron could find them all. It would be prohibitively expensive for the DPLA to bring together materials from every single library, archive and museum in the country. Instead, the DPLA plans to connect existing state infrastructure to create a system of state (or in some cases, regional) service hubs, each offering standardized digital services to local institutions, including digitization and metadata services, and serving as an on-ramp for all by aggregating metadata and data from local institutions to feed into a new DPLA network. Over forty state digital libraries already exist, along with several regional digital libraries that span several states. Through the DPLA, states ought to be able to aggregate data from their local institutions; the DPLA, in turn, will aggregate data from states and regions, pooling it into a large discovery database that will be made freely available to libraries, archives and museums—and, directly, to individuals..."

Link:

http://www.thedigitalshift.com/2012/11/digital-libraries/building-a-digital-public-library-of-america/

From feeds:

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

Tags:

oa.new oa.licensing oa.comment oa.europeana oa.usa oa.copyright oa.libraries oa.events oa.museums oa.metadata oa.librarians oa.digitization oa.funders oa.dlf oa.berkman_center oa.apis oa.dpla oa.archives oa.clir oa.neh oa.curators oa.archivists oa.osi oa.mellon_foundation oa.soaln_foundation oa.soros_foundation oa.usa.mn oa.usa.ma oa.usa.sc oa.usa.ky oa.usa.or oa.arcadia oa.libre oa.ch oa.announcements

Date tagged:

11/28/2012, 14:25

Date published:

11/28/2012, 09:25