Digital Public Library of America

Discover 48,791,233 images, texts, videos, and sounds from across the United States

DPLA introduces The Banned Book Club

DPLA has launched The Banned Book Club to ensure that all readers have access to the books they want to read. The Banned Book Club makes e-book versions of banned books available to readers in locations across the United States where titles have been banned via the free Palace e-reader app.

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Online Exhibitions

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Race to the Moon

A History of US Public Libraries

Building the First Transcontinental Railroad

From Colonialism to Tourism: Maps in American Culture

Primary Source Sets

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The Transatlantic Slave Trade

Fannie Lou Hamer and the Civil Rights Movement in Rural Mississippi

Second Ku Klux Klan and The Birth of a Nation

John Brown's Raid on Harper's Ferry

The Equal Rights Amendment

How can I use DPLA?

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Education

Educators and students explore our Primary Source Sets to discover history and culture through primary sources and ideas for classroom use.

Family Research

Genealogists use our search tools to find free materials for their family history research projects.

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Lifelong Learning

Lifelong learners enjoy browsing by topic and viewing Online Exhibitions to learn more about their interests.

Scholarly Research

Scholarly researchers use DPLA to find open access sources from archives across the country through a single portal.

If you’re new to DPLA, these research guides will give you a head start using our site. The guides reflect a few key activities that attract visitors to DPLA, but you can explore many other interests here too.

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DPLA News

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Expanding access through content licensing
September 14, 2023
DPLA’s mission is to maximize access to knowledge, and one of the ways we do that is by working to make the best possible ebook and audiobook licensing options available…
Culture Heritage and Structured Data: How DPLA became the biggest institution to contribute to Structured Data on Commons
September 12, 2023
Last week, I partnered with Giovanna Fontenelle, Wikimedia’s Program Officer, Culture and Heritage, for this article, posted originally on Wikimedia’s News site Diff, about DPLA’s Wikimedia work. Over the last…
DPLA kicks off Strategic Visioning Process
August 21, 2023
This summer I’ve given updates on our work at the ALA Annual Conference in June and at last month’s DPLA Open Board + Community Meeting. I shared a summary of…