DPLA Featured on NPR’s All Things Considered

By Kenny Whitebloom, August 19, 2013.
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The DPLA was featured recently on NPR’s All Things Considered as part of their series, “Keys To The Whole World: American Public Libraries.” Included in the August 19, 2013 radio segment are John Palfrey, President of the DPLA Board of Directors, Luis Herrera, DPLA Board member, and Lincoln Mullen, a PhD candidate in history and regular contributor to ProfHacker. To listen to the segment, “Combining the Nation’s Digitized Libraries, All in One Place,” click here.

From Laura Sydell’s segment on NPR’s All Things Considered:

Buried in the archives of America’s public and academic libraries are historical treasures — old papers, photos and records — that flesh out a detailed picture of our past.

Many libraries are trying to make it easier to find that material by putting digital copies online. But with so many different websites and databases to turn to, it may still require a research degree in Web searching to find anything. This spring, a program launched that aims to put all that great stuff in one place: the Digital Public Library of America.

The DPLA has already drawn scholars like Lincoln Mullen, a graduate student at Brandeis University who is researching the history of religious conversion in the United States. Mullen says the DPLA uncovered some hard-to-find documents at the College of Charleston in South Carolina — handwritten letters by a slave owner, William H.W. Barnwell, in which Barnwell discussed religious instruction to slaves and how the North misunderstood the South in these matters.