DPLA Launch Press Roundup: First Reactions
Librarians Respond to DPLA Launch
“Reactions on twitter were enthusiastic on Thursday. Rachel Frick, director of the Digital Library Federation Program, Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) posted “#dpla experiencing half million views per hour. NICE.” Jonathan Zittrain, Co-Founder and Director for Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society tweeted that “The @dpla has geocoded its archives — http://dp.la/map is wonderfully addictive. (Zooming in shows more and more.)” And the official account of NYPL Labs tweeted “And for nerds like us, not only does @DPLA offer a SICK API, but there’s a BULK DATA DOWNLOAD too!””
From Matt Enis’s article for The Digital Shift, Librarians Respond to DPLA Launch
The Digital Public Library of America: Details, the Librarian Response and the Future
” The prevailing zeitgeist of open, collaborative, “public,” project-based, and community-built and -owned initiatives serves the DPLA well. Margaret Heller, writing for ACRL Tech Connect, reported from DPLA Midwest, “I found the meeting to be inspirational about the future for libraries to cross boundaries and build exciting new collections. I still have many unanswered questions, but as everyone throughout the day understands, this will be a platform on which we can build and imagine” (Heller, 2012). In a similar spirit to the crowdsourced participation of Wikipedia, “The DPLA… [is] very leanly staffed with tons of volunteers,” says John Palfrey. Thousands of librarians, technologists, students, professors, curators, and administrators worked to build the project over two years through discussions and hackathons. “This may feel like a utopian project,” Palfrey continues. “If we don’t aim for what we want, we’ll sell ourselves short. We need to get in front of this mob and call it a parade” (Borman, 2012).”
From Micah Vandegrift’s article for In The Library with the Lead Pipe, The Digital Public Library of America: Details, the Librarian Response and the Future.
Order and Liberty: The DPLA Launches
“Those used to the colorful face-out display shelves of Goodreads or LibraryThing may find it a little subdued, but it isn’t meant to serve as a showroom to promote the sale of book. As the site explains, “StackLife is an experiment and a prototype. The main aim is to show the power of the DPLA’s architecture: Anyone can write a new way of browsing the DPLA without asking permission. This makes the DPLA’s collection an open-ended resource for innovation.” All of the contents and the architecture of the DPLA is like this – not just open for browsing and reading, but open for creation and innovation.”
From Barbra Fister’s article for Inside Higher Ed, Order and Liberty: The DPLA Launches
The Digital Public Library of America Has Arrived
“The Digital Public Library of America has just launched and can be found at the annoyingly unconventional URL http://dp.la. That’s the only criticism I have to make of it, the funny domain name. Otherwise it’s an impressive performance. I have just begun to browse it and expect that I will come to use it regularly. It’s a bit like Wikipedia in that respect — always present in the background when you need it and welcome for precisely that reason.”
From Joseph Esposito’s article in The Scholarly Kitchen, The Digital Public Library of America Has Arrived
Digital Public Library of America
“One thing to keep in mind is that DPLA is not so much a library as an enormous card catalog, with the “shelves” of books, photographs, and so forth being the digital collections of libraries and historical societies, large and small, all over the country. The range of material offered through the Digital Public Library of America reflects what people running the local collections have decided to digitize and make available. What DPLA gathers and makes searchable is the metadata: descriptions of what a document contains (its subject, origins, copyright status, and so on) and of its characteristics as a digital object (size and file type).”
From Scott McLemee’s article for Inside Higher Ed, Digital Public Library of America
Launch Time! The Digital Public Library of America Discovery Prototype is Now Live
“infoDOCKET would like to congratulate the entire DPLA team on the launch of today’s prototype.”
“We’re excited to take a look around.”
“Remember, today’s launch is a prototype/beta.”
“In other words, there is a lot more work to be done in all areas including technology, content, and maketing/promotion.”
“Make sure to share with DPLA what you like, don’t like, and what else you would like to see.”
From Gary Price’s post on INFOdocket, Launch Time! The Digital Public Library of America Discovery Prototype is Now Live
What we hope the Digital Public Library of America will become
“Happily, we’ve already heard that the DPLA is releasing all of this data about cultural works that they will be collecting using the CC0 legal tool – meaning that anyone can use, share or build on this information without restriction. We hope they continue to proactively encourage institutions to explicitly open up metadata about their works, and to release this as machine-readable raw data.”
From Jonathan Gray’s post on the Open Knowledge Foundation Blog, What we hope the Digital Public Library of America will become