DPLA November 2020 Newsletter
Thanks to everyone who joined us on October 29th for From Black Women’s Suffrage to Black Lives Matter, the latest in our Black Women’s Suffrage event series. The event was presented in partnership with Charlotte Mecklenburg Library, and examined the legacy of Black Women’s early activism and its connections to the present moment, as well as their work with Wikipedia and WFAE to make local news and history more accessible. In case you missed it, a recording is now available. Find out more about Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s Engage2020 program here.
Black Women’s Suffrage to Black Lives Matter: A Living Legacy
Have you explored the Black Women’s Suffrage collection yet? Check it out here.
Are your collections part of the Black Women’s Suffrage Collection? Hub analytics for the Black Women’s Suffrage collection are now available in the analytics dashboard. Use the dashboard to find out how many of your items are in the collection, and how they are being used.
Right Statements News
Did you know that more than half of all the artifacts in the DPLA aggregation now are accompanied by standardized rights statements? Currently the five hubs with the highest number of items with rights statements (with the percentage of each hub’s items with rights statements in parentheses) are:
- U.S. National Archives (100%)
- New York Public Library (100%)
- Portal to Texas History (71%)
- Digital Library of Georgia (98%)
- Plains to Peaks Collective (100%)
The DPLA tech team is currently working on adding a feature to the DPLA Search that will allow users to filter results by rights statement status.
To find out more about standardized rights statements and how to apply them to your digital collection, watch this recording of our Standardized Rights Statements 101 webinar, presented by the DPLA Rights Statements Working Group.
Big Sky Country Digital Network + DPLA
Big Sky Country Digital Network and DPLA are collaborating on a pilot project with the goal of running experiments aimed at improvements to search and discovery of items/objects accessed via the dp.la website. BSCDN will provide 4,000 full-frame images for indexing and experimentation. The expectation is that presenting full-frame images in the portal will result in much higher levels of harvesting and indexing by Google, and eventually higher discoverability and greater impact. We’ll be sharing more information on this project as we have it.
Upcoming Events!
DPLA Network Brown Bag: Aggregation Tool Design Discussion
Thursday, December 3rd at 1-1:45 pm ET
This is for a session for hub administrators, project coordinators, metadata librarians, and other cultural heritage workers interested in helping us determine how to create an Aggregation tool that would best serve your needs. We’re also building the tool to include pathways of participation for new partners outside of the hub network (community archives, independent archivists) and we hope you will invite collaborators who might speak from this perspective as well.
If you missed our first brown bag on this topic, DPLA + Discoverability, a recording is available.
Network Brown Bag: Continuing the Conversation on Discoverability
January 21, 2021 at 1-1:45 pm ET
Hosts: Christine Kim, Brian Tingle, Adrian Turner from California Digital Library
Continuing the conversation from previous Network Brown Bags, this session will highlight work that the California Digital Library’s Calisphere team has been conducting to assess usage and discoverability of content available in Calisphere — and strategies that the team is formulating and implementing to facilitate broader access.
Calling all hubs! Would you like to host an upcoming network brown bag? If you have a topic or theme you’d like to discuss with your colleagues around the network, let us know!
DPLA Ebooks News
- Earlier this month, DPLA launched a new and improved DPLA Exchange, a non-profit ebook and audiobook marketplace that helps libraries to cost-effectively expand access to their digital collections. The DPLA Exchange is an important element of our work to offer a robust public option for the purchase and distribution of ebooks and audiobooks. Find out more here.
- Did you know that DPLA works with state libraries to help them maximize access to ebooks for all state residents? Find out more in this Q+A with Mark Smith, Director and Librarian of the Texas State Library and Archives Commission.
- The DPLA Open Bookshelf now contains more than 8,500 open access books! Visit freebooks.dp.la to instantly download any of these titles, no login or registration required!
DPLA’s ebook work is supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
In Case You Missed It…
- Mountain West Digital Library shared in a recent blog post how MWDL partners are using digital libraries to document present history, aggregating existing collections to provide new historical context and contextualizing local events on the national and global stage. Recent collections highlight content on pandemics and voting rights. Read more here.
- We were delighted by this excellent video created recently by Chris Breitenbach at the Skokie Public Library in Illinois about DPLA. Thank you, Chris!
- Shaneé Yvette Murrain, our Director of Community Engagement, recently spoke at the Well-Read Black Girl Festival along with historian Allison Robinson and author and historian Michelle Duster, the great-granddaughter of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, to explore how digital artifacts can help us better understand the legacy of Black women suffragists. Watch a replay here!