End of Summer update from DPLA

Dear friends of DPLA, 

We’ve had a busy summer at DPLA, as we make the turn into fall I wanted to share an update on all the things that we’ve been up to.

At our Community + Open Board meeting in July, we shared an update on our process for selecting a long-term home for our signature cultural heritage aggregation program. In the weeks since, we have chosen that new home and begun establishing the partnership that will anchor this important collaboration. We are thrilled with how this process has evolved and where we’re headed, and we are eager to share the official news. I’m confident that our new institutional partner will open up new opportunities for collaboration, curation and use of our collections. We expect to be able to announce the name of our partner in the fall.

I’m also excited to share that DPLA will continue to host and support our cultural heritage aggregation work throughout 2025. We’ll maintain the work as we have in the past, and I’m optimistic that we will be able to offer expanded services, as well. Twenty twenty-five will be a transition year which we will use to collaboratively design with our partners how we fully launch in the new home in 2026. (You can read more about this search and selection process here.)

We’re also planning to bring back DPLAFest for the first time since before the pandemic. Among other things, we hope to use that time to plan the future together. We’ll share how you can be involved in planning and shaping our time together in the weeks to come.

Here are some other things we’ve been up to:

• At last month’s Community meeting, we also shared what we learned from a series of online meetings with library leaders to solicit their ideas of AI at their public libraries. After hosting a series of virtual round tables we’ve selected a small number of public libraries interested in partnering with us to conduct experiments over the next six months. Working with University of Washington professor Ben Lee, we plan to share what we and our partners learn in the spring. (If you missed the session, you can watch it here.)  

• Earlier this month we announced a groundbreaking agreement with the Independent Publishers Group to empower libraries to purchase and own ebooks and audiobooks, just as they do with the books on their shelves. This was a group effort, involving our Palace partners Lyrasis, librarians, publishers, legal scholars and advocates from across the country, and I’m confident it’s a first step towards wider adoption of models that serve libraries and readers. (You can find coverage of the announcement in Library Journal, Publisher’s Weekly, and Library Futures.)

• We hosted a webinar series on Critical Approaches to Assessment, here, and co-hosted “Ebook Friday” at the ALA Annual Conference in San Diego.

It’s been a productive summer, and we’ll have more to share about the fall in the weeks ahead, including a resumption of our Collaborating for Access series, new DPLA Book Talk and our plans for September’s Banned Book Week.  

Thank you all for your ongoing support and partnership– we can’t do any of this without you.

Happy Labor Day, 

John S. Bracken

Executive Director, DPLA