Digital Public Library of America

Discover 47,681,069 images, texts, videos, and sounds from across the United States

Read for free with Palace Bookshelf!

The Palace Bookshelf is a collection of more than 15,000 open access ebooks that are available for free download. The collection includes classics, children's books, textbooks, foreign language titles, and more. Image courtesy Recollection Wisconsin via dp.la.

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Online Exhibitions

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Prisoners at Home: Everyday Life in Japanese Internment Camps

American Aviatrixes: Women with Wings

History of Survivance: Upper Midwest 19th-Century Native American Narratives

A History of US Public Libraries

Primary Source Sets

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Voting Rights Act of 1965

Pablo Picasso's Guernica and Modern War

Elie Wiesel's Night and the Holocaust

Stonewall and Its Impact on the Gay Liberation Movement

Environmental Preservation in the Progressive Era

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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DPLA seeks librarians to join Curation Corps
January 5, 2023
Our mission at DPLA is to maximize access to our shared history, culture, and knowledge. One of the ways we do this is through our ebooks program, which is an…
DPLA to make cultural treasures freely available on Wikipedia with new Sloan Foundation support
January 4, 2023
A $750,000 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to the Digital Public Library of America will fuel a multi-year effort to connect America’s cultural heritage institutions with Wikipedia, the…
DPLA’s Digital Equity Project: An update from Charlotte Mecklenburg Library’s Living Archives project
December 12, 2022
This is the second blog in a series from DPLA’s Digital Equity Project: Advancing Racial Justice in American Libraries. (You can find the first here.) This month, I am pleased…