Community Stories

In a recent post on the PLA blog, Nate Hill of the San Jose public library recapped his experience at the recent National Digital Public Library meeting at the Los Angeles Public Library, and took this opportunity to suggest a new direction for public libraries and the Digital Public Library of America. Read the rest of this entry »

With projects like the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) and HathiTrust at the forefront of the digital library conversation, and representing a potential direction of digital library efforts, it is vital to incorporate the perspective of librarians from a variety of institutions and create space for collaboration across fields. This panel consists of both public and academic librarians from across the nation: Sandra McIntyre, Cheryl Walters, Nate Hill, Toby Greenwalt, Michael Lascarides, and Jefferson Bailey. Read the rest of this entry »

The White House Blog reported last week that the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy has released two Requests for Information (RFI), “soliciting public input on long term preservation of and public access to the results of federally funded research, including digital data and peer-reviewed scholarly publications.” Read the rest of this entry »

DPLA staffers interviewed a variety of attendees at the Digital Public Library of America Plenary Meeting on October 21 in Washington, DC.

During the public Plenary Meeting for the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) at the National Archives and Records Administration on October 21, 2011, a few very exciting announcements were made that will contribute to the foundation and future of the DPLA.
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In a recent post at danbri.org, Dan Brinkley documents some of his work on NoTube (a European research project exploring Semantic Web and TV), reflects on the possibilities of linking bibliographic data with other web content, and calls for a contest to engage researchers in linked TV and bibliographic data.

Responding to Brinkley’s call via the DPLA listserv, Karen Coyle observes:

“A big and powerful chunk of knowledge organization that is just begging for exploitation is the fact that library records have classification numbers and subject headings from thesauri. All of this could now be correlated with an analysis of the full text. It’s only another step to associate this same information with non-library materials. The classifications have the advantage of being organized knowledge with implicit class membership and lots of interesting sibling relationships. What libraries have is not complete nor perfect, but it’s a seed to be built on, something that doesn’t exist when you do keyword indexing without any semantics.”

Join the conversation by commenting on Brinkley’s post or chiming in on the listserv thread!

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).