Collaborations Stories

The official website for the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) went live on Tuesday, October 4, 2011. Read about this exciting project, and listen to Robert Darnton, director of Harvard University’s library and one of the DPLA’s steering-committee members, explain the mission and goals of the DPLA, at The Atlantic online. Remember, the DPLA Plenary Meeting is open to the public and coming up soon on October 21 at the National Archives in Washington, DC!

Washington, DC, and Urbana-Champaign, IL, October 5, 2011

The Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship (CIRSS) at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois, and the Council on Library and Information Resources’ DLF program, will present their submission to the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) Beta Sprint at the DPLA Plenary meeting, October 21, 2011, in Washington, DC.
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After attending the Global Interoperability and Linked Data Workshop, a meeting of the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) in Amsterdam, Ed Summers from the Library of Congress reflected on the relationship between the leadership style of the steering committee and their commitment to developing the DPLA as a generative platform for rich discovery environments:

“The thing I learned at the meeting in Amsterdam is that this nebulousness is by design–not by accident. The DPLA steering committee aren’t really pushing a particular solution that they have in mind. In fact, there doesn’t seem to be a clear consensus about what problem they are trying to solve. Instead the steering committee seem to be making a concerted effort to keep an open, beginners-mind about what a Digital Public Library of America might be. [...] Keeping an open mind in situations like this takes quite a bit of effort. There is often an irresistable urge to jump to particular use cases, scenarios or technical solutions, for fear of seeming ill informed or rudderless. I think the DPLA should be commended for creating conversations at this formative stage, instead of solutions in search of a problem.”

Read the full post by Summers on his blog, Inkdroid.

The DLF/DCC Beta Sprint project was featured on the home page of the Graduate School of Library & Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The press release underscored the collaborative efforts of the current Beta Sprint project as well as its foundation on the collaborative IMLS Digital Collections and Content project:

“Professor Carole Palmer, director of the Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship (CIRSS), has been awarded a planning grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to participate in the Beta Sprint project launched by the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA).

Palmer is working with her co-PI Rachel Frick at the Digital Library Federation, a program of the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). They are developing a functional prototype that will redesign the IMLS Digital Collections and Content (IMLS DCC) resource as a core base of content for the DPLA. The IMLS DCC, originally launched in 2003, is an aggregation of digital collections from libraries, museums, and archives, supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services and developed through a collaboration between CIRSS and the University Library.”

Other members of the DLF/DCC Beta Sprint team working with Palmer and Frick are coordinator Jacob Jett, research assistant Richard Urban, coordinator Katrina Fenlon, and research assistant Peter Organisciak (pictured below from left to right).

Paid Internship Opportunity: Research Assistant for the Digital Public Library of America planning initiative

Are you a student interested in helping to launch a large-scale digital public library in the United States? Excited about the future of online access to information? Want to collaborate closely with innovative partners in public and research libraries, government, publishing, and elsewhere?

The Berkman Center seeks two part-time Research Assistants for the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) planning initiative. The DPLA planning initiative is bringing together representatives from public and research libraries, the educational community, cultural organizations, state and local government, publishers, authors, and private industry in a series of meetings and workshops to examine strategies for improving public access to comprehensive online resources. More information about the initiative can be found at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/research/dpla. These positions are ideal for students who are looking to learn more about, and contribute to, these efforts.

Position Responsibilities:

Primary responsibilities will be to support the DPLA Secretariat, which includes staying abreast of developments in the digital library field (including news related to e-publishing, copyright, linked open data, and other areas), blogging regularly on these issues, writing weekly round-ups of the DPLA public listserv, and contributing to the DPLA wiki and forthcoming website. The RAs will also assist with preparations for the DPLA plenary meeting in October and occasional workshops, including opportunities to create related multimedia. This position represents an ideal opportunity for those interested in digital humanities, intellectual property issues, and access to knowledge and information.

Required Education, Experience and Skills:

• Advanced writing and editing skills, with the ability to quickly draft and contextualize written materials within the suite of the project outputs;

• Excellent critical reading comprehension, with the ability to absorb material quickly;

• Attention to detail;

• Strong knowledge of basic HTML;

• Familiarity with common social media tools such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube;

• Prior wiki editing experience or a willingness to learn.

Additional Skills/Interests Helpful for This Position:

• Expertise in fields such as digital humanities, library and information science, law, or journalism;

• Media production, including experience recording and/or editing audio and/or video;

• Prior blogging experience;

• Familiarity with WordPress.

The Research Assistant Will Have the Opportunity to:

• Boost his or her research credentials;

• Creatively bridge research and practice;

• Become a key member of the Digital Public Library of America team;

• Participate in the greater Berkman Center community and engage in ongoing dynamic conversations at the forefront of thought on technology and society.

Time Commitment & Payment:

RAs work approximately 8-12 hours per week. Compensation is the standard Harvard RA/intern rate of $11.50/hour. No other benefits are provided.

This position is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and remote participation is not possible for this opportunity.

We’re looking to have RAs join us in fall 2011.

To apply:

Please send your current CV or resume and a cover letter summarizing your interest and experience to Rebekah Heacock at rheacock@cyber.law.harvard.edu with “Application for DPLA RA” in the subject line.

On August 11, 2011, DPLA chair John Palfrey announced the newest member of the Digital Public Library of America Steering Committee:

“I am writing with the good news that Dwight McInvaill, Director of the Georgetown County Library (South Carolina), will be joining the Digital Public Library of America Steering Committee.

The Steering Committee is working to bring together representatives from the educational community, public and research libraries, cultural organizations, state and local government, publishers, authors, and private industry in a series of meetings and workshops to discuss legal, policy, and technical issues surrounding public access to comprehensive online resources. We hope to emerge with a concrete workplan and a governance structure that captures the consensus of representatives of the country’s libraries, universities, archives, and museums for moving forward together with a shared vision for a Digital Public Library of America.

We are thrilled to welcome Dwight to the Steering Committee.”

Mr. McInvaill will bring to the steering committee 30 years of public library service, as well as experience chairing the American Library Association’s Taskforce on Rural School, Tribal, and Public Libraries and the Rural Libraries Committee of the Public Library Association. He is currently a board member of the Association of Rural and Small Libraries. In 2009, Mr. McInvaill was presented with an I Love My Librarian Award from the Carnegie Foundation and the New York Times.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded CLIR/DLF a $46,000 planning grant to develop a prototype for the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). The prototype will be submitted to the DPLA “beta sprint,” which seeks “ideas, models, prototypes, technical tools, [or] user interfaces . . . that demonstrate how the DPLA might index and provide access to a wide range of broadly distributed content.”

Rachel Frick, director of the DLF program, will manage the project and serve as co-principal investigator with Carole Palmer, professor and director of the Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC).

Palmer will lead UIUC staff in developing the prototype, which will demonstrate how the IMLS Digital Collections and Content Registry (DCC) and its research and development activities can serve the DPLA as a critical mass of base content, as well as an aggregation model. A functional prototype will be produced in combination with a set of static wireframes and demonstrations, showing how DCC’s advances in content, metadata, user experience, and infrastructure can be leveraged for the DPLA.

Palmer and Frick will work closely with Geneva Henry, executive director of the Center for Digital Scholarship at Rice University, who will produce a report that reviews current literature pertaining to the technical aspects of large-scale collection aggregations and federations. The report will review and compare the system architectures, content types, and scale of content of the DCC, Europeana, the National Science Digital Library, and other aggregations to shed light on how and why large-scale aggregation projects succeed or fail. The report will also identify potential content providers for the DPLA, and will estimate the time, effort, and other costs required to ingest these resources into the prototype.

“This is an important strategic grant,” said CLIR President Chuck Henry. “The DPLA can and should become a fundamental asset for the nation—a genuine common good that can benefit students, researchers, and citizens at large, to grow over time to become a new and essential environment for teaching and learning. The prototype will be developed with this larger mission in mind: building a digital public library that responds to our curiosity and our myriad intellectual interests, and that reflects the complexity and power of our cultural heritage.”

“The DPLA Steering Committee is delighted that the Mellon Foundation is supporting CLIR in its work as part of the beta sprint,” said John Palfrey, chair of the DPLA’s Steering Committee. “CLIR has been a leader in thinking about and building the future of libraries. Its participation in the DPLA to date has been crucial and we look forward to seeing what they come up with as part of the beta sprint process.”

The Digital Public Library of America initiative was launched in December 2010 to explore strategies for developing 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.

DLF has awarded $50,000 to fund research on business cases for new service development in research libraries.

The project will develop guidance for academic libraries seeking to support innovative services such as publishing and data management activities on their campuses.

Librarians from four universities and OCLC will investigate business-planning literature and study established publishing and data curation services. The project will result in a series of publications, to be published between fall 2011 and August 2012, that will suggest a model for the business planning of new ventures and services. The model will help libraries determine whether a new service is feasible and, if so, how to make a persuasive case for the resources required.

“Libraries have vast expertise in structuring and managing data, and knowledge about how readers connect to published products,” said Mike Furlough of Penn State University.

“As scholarly publishing and scientific research evolve, we have seen new directives from the NIH and other government agencies requiring that researchers give considered thought to the future life of research products of many types,” said Furlough. “We see important roles for libraries in support of our researchers, but only if our community can build and sustain these types of programs.”

The project team also includes Theodore Fons, OCLC; Carol Hunter, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill; Elizabeth Kirk, Dartmouth College; and Michele Reid, North Dakota State University. The team formed out of the 2010 Senior Fellows Program at University of California, Los Angeles, a professional development program for senior level academic librarians sponsored by the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies and led by Beverly Lynch.

Judy Luther, president of Informed Strategies, will advise the project and facilitate discussions as the team analyzes the relevant literature, develops a model, selects case study candidates, digests outcomes, and shapes a final report.

The team hopes that the lessons learned will be applicable to other library service areas. “In today’s economic and information environment, we must be able to analyze and justify every service we offer and become more comfortable with evaluating potential new service areas,” said Hunter. “This method and our conclusions will provide a model for doing that.”

The Digital Library Federation program today announced its formal alliance with centerNet. Established in 2007, centerNet is an international network of digital humanities centers formed for cooperative and collaborative action that benefits the digital humanities and allied fields in general, and has special resources in the domain of cyberinfrastructure to offer humanities centers in particular.The affiliation will focus on areas where digital libraries and digital humanities converge and need further exploration and understanding of each community’s roles and responsibilities. More information can be found here.

Save the date for CURATECamp 2011 – August 15 and 16. This summer’s camp will be at Stanford University. DLF is excited to provide support towards this dynamic effort. More information will be posted soon on the CURATECamp website.