DPLA Update

For the past several months, the leadership and board of the Digital Public Library of America have been developing and refining a strategy that will enable us to build on the success of our first five years and ensure the long-term future of DPLA.

We recognized that in order to do so, we had to make the hard decision to reorganize and right-size our staff. As a result, last week we eliminated six positions, effective tomorrow, November 15. We know these changes have been difficult for all involved, especially, of course for the DPLA staff members whose positions were eliminated. We are grateful to these colleagues’ contributions over the years and are doing everything we can to ensure their ongoing career success.

As you can imagine, this was an extremely difficult decision, but ultimately one we feel was necessary to ensure the organization is positioned to fulfill its strategic goals while remaining financially sound.

We are proud of the significant milestones DPLA and the larger DPLA community have achieved this year, including:

• Convening the first Members Meeting of our national network;
  Ingesting content at a rate 10x faster than through the implementation of Ingest3;
• More effectively collaborating on new tools, processes and platforms, such as the forthcoming DPLALocal;
• Introducing and growing DPLA Exchange, our ebooks platform; and
• Successfully piloting SimplyE in libraries across the country.

This progress sets us up well for 2019 and beyond.

We remain committed to supporting the high-quality metadata standards and processes established by DPLA and our community.

We are working to create opportunities for discussion during which we will map out DPLA’s path forward and answer any questions the community may have.

For further information, please read our Q&A