DPLAfest 2013: In Review

Just last week, from October 24-25, we held our first DPLAfest—two days of vibrant discussions  and workshops that brought together more than 450 librarians, archivists, museum professionals, developers, technologists, publishers, authors, teachers, students and other participants from across the country.

At Thursday’s opening kick-off reception at the Boston Public Library, we made some big announcements: a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to promote digital training in local libraries; the launch of the DPLA Bookshelf that lets users explore our content in new, intuitive ways; and the inclusion of three new service hubs to our growing network. We also launched a new donations page and a Community Reps program, which gets users involved in spreading the news about the DPLA to their own communities.

The nearly twenty workshops that took place on Friday, both at Northeastern University and Simmons College, covered a wide range of topics. Throughout this coming week, we’ll be pulling some key themes from those presentations and discussions to highlight on the DPLA blog.

DPLAfest was also an exciting opportunity for us to get input directly from our community of partners and users. Through things like an open meeting with our Board of Directors and group discussions on how to best use the DPLA in a variety of settings, we had the chance to hear more about what we’re doing right and how to shape our future.

If you’re eager to find out more, there are still many ways to get caught up on everything that happened at DPLAfest. You can view recordings of Thursday’s opening reception remarks, as well as Friday’s kick-off and wrap-up sessions. You can get an overview of what we’re all about with “The Digital Public Library of America: An Introduction.” You can read the live notes from all of Friday’s workshops, view photos from the events, and catch up on what was happening on social media. Or, for a quick overview, check out our word cloud from fest participants live tweeting with #dplafest.

Wordcloud created in tagxedo.com

All written content on this blog is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. All images found on this blog are available under the specific license(s) attributed to them, unless otherwise noted.