Digital Public Library of America receives $96,000 grant from the Whiting Foundation to expand its impact in education
The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) is pleased to announce that it has received $96,000 from the Whiting Foundation to begin creating resources for users in K-12 and higher education. The grant will allow DPLA to develop and share primary source sets built on the foundation of national educational standards and under the guidance of a diverse group of education experts. DPLA will also refine tools for creating user-generated content so that students and teachers can curate their own resources as part of the learning process.
“We are very grateful to the Whiting Foundation for their continued support of our education work, and we look forward to connecting a growing community of students with the rich primary source materials provided by our partners,” said Franky Abbott, DPLA’s Project Manager and American Council of Learned Societies Public Fellow.
This grant builds on DPLA’s recent Whiting-funded efforts to understand the ways large-scale digital collections can best adapt their resources to address classroom needs. This work culminated in a comprehensive research paper published in April 2015.
“The growing collection of primary sources created by the Digital Public Library of America and its partners has the potential to become an unparalleled educational resource for teachers, students – and indeed anyone with a spark of curiosity and an internet connection,” said Whiting Foundation Executive Director Daniel Reid. “The Whiting Foundation is proud to continue our support for the DPLA’s work to build out new features and content to meet this purpose more effectively.”
“DPLA seeks not only to bring together openly available materials, but to maximize their use, and education is an essential realm for that use,” said Dan Cohen, DPLA’s Executive Director. “Thanks to the Whiting Foundation, we can move forward with the creation of easy-to-use resources, which we believe will help students and teachers in both K-12 and college.”
If you are interested in learning more about DPLA’s education work or getting involved, please email education@dp.la.
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About the Digital Public Library of America
The Digital Public Library of America (http://dp.la) strives to contain the full breadth of human expression, from the written word, to works of art and culture, to records of America’s heritage, to the efforts and data of science. Since launching in April 2013, it has aggregated over 10 million items from over 1,600 institutions. The DPLA is a registered 501(c)(3) non-profit.
About the Whiting Foundation
The Whiting Foundation (www.whitingfoundation.org) has supported scholars and writers for more than forty years. This grant is part of the Foundation’s efforts to infuse the humanities into American public culture.