DPLAfest 2017: Post-Fest Wrap Up

From all of us at DPLA, we would like to offer our sincere thanks to all who joined us in Chicago last week for DPLAfest 2017! Whether you attended the fest or joined the conversation from afar, we deeply appreciate the contributions of each participant, presenter and volunteer. For those who couldn’t make it to Chicago (or who couldn’t be in multiple great sessions at once), we have compiled the following one-stop guide to the news, notes, media, and other materials documenting DPLAfest 2017.

Announcements & Milestones

DPLAfest officially kicked off Thursday morning at Chicago Public Library’s Harold Washington Library Center with a warm welcome to the city of Chicago and a report on DPLA’s recent milestones and new initiatives from DPLA Executive Director Dan Cohen. Highlights included:

• Our Values – We proudly unveiled DPLA’s new Values Statement, which outlines the core commitments of our organization and our staff. We intend for this document to be a dynamic guide for our practice going forward and a reference against which we can track our progress as we continually strive to embody these values throughout the institution.
• Expansion of the DPLA partner network – In addition to several new Service Hubs accepted this year, DPLA was proud to officially welcome the Library of Congress as a contributing Content Hub. With these new collections and others from established partners, DPLA now makes over 16 million items from 2,350 libraries, archives, and museums freely discoverable for all.
• Implementing Rights Statements – RightsStatements.org has been well received by cultural heritage professionals within the DPLA network and around the world. Digital libraries in Brazil, Australia, New Zealand, and India will be joining the project, with interest from additional libraries on every continent.
• Next steps for Ebooks – Children across the country downloaded over 1.5 million books through Open eBooks and DPLA is exploring new ways of facilitating discovery of free, open content with generous support from the Sloan Foundation.
• Expanding Education Work – With funding from the Teagle Foundation, DPLA will expand its Education Advisory Committee, continue to develop primary source sets, and build and pilot a curriculum for professional development for instructors in K-12 and higher education during 2017 and 2018.

Media

We were thrilled to have staff from American Libraries magazine join us throughout the fest. Check out their articles on the themes, conversations, and selected topics that emerged during the event.

• DPLAfest Comes to Chicago by John Amundsen
• DPLAfest: Inclusion, Community, and Outreach by Carrie Smith
• The Devil is in the Digital Details by Terra Dankowski

I missed it! Where are the slides?

Presenters, we would love for you to share your slides and presentation materials with the broad DPLA community. If you have not already, you can upload your slides to Sched by logging in and selecting your session.

To find presentation slides and notes from DPLAfest 2017 sessions, visit the online agenda and select a session. Some presenters also shared slides during the fest via Twitter. Check Storify below for links.

Join our Team

Before the close of the fest, we posted a job opening for a full time Developer for Frontend and Web Applications. Apply to join our team and help us spread the word about this opportunity!

Special Thanks

DPLA would like to acknowledge and thank the gracious DPLAfest 2017 host organizations, Chicago Public Library, Black Metropolis Research Consortium, Chicago Collections, and Reaching Across the Illinois Library System (RAILS) as well as the generous sponsors of DPLAfest 2017, Datalogics, OCLC, Lyrasis, Sony, and an anonymous donor.

Photos

View selected photos from DPLAfest 2017 in our Flickr album.

Storify

Special thanks to the many DPLAfest-goers who helped capture the sessions and conversations taking place on social media. View a selection of highlights in Storify below or explore the full conversation using #DPLAfest.