Press: DPLA: Looking Forward, Interview with Emily Gore
“Shortly after the DPLA Midwest Plenary in October,* DPLA Director for Content Emily Gore spoke with CLIR Issues about the DPLA, its April 2013 launch, and what’s next.
“How do DPLA efforts build on past digital library work?
“The whole idea of the DPLA is to take advantage of existing infrastructure to expose content that is already out there. We’ve designed the Digital Hub Pilot Program—where we have both service hubs and content hubs—to take advantage of that infrastructure.
“In the Digital Hub Pilot Program there are seven service hubs: six are statewide collaborations and one is a regional collaborative digital library that includes three states. These collaborations have digitized material from throughout their states and regions—a number of them have been doing this for years. Many of these partners have been sponsored by LSTA (Library Services and Technology Act) funding, through IMLS (Institute of Museum and Library Services), and by other grants. These collaborations have involved all kinds of cultural heritage institutions in digitizing, in describing the materials via metadata, and in making material available on a statewide basis. We are working with these states and regions and the content that they already have aggregated. The DPLA itself is not creating any new content.
“In addition to the service hubs we have content hubs, which are large content holders. We already have commitments from Harvard University, the National Archives, and the Smithsonian. We’ll soon announce several other large content holders that will be working with us on this initial pilot project. Bringing all of that metadata together into an aggregation is the initial goal for the April release for these service hubs and content hubs. …
“How can broader community become engaged with the DPLA?
There are lots of opportunities for participation. There is a broad discussion listserv and there are specific listservs representing each of the six workstreams in DPLA: audience and participation, content and scope, financial and business models, governance, legal issues, and technical aspects. The workstreams also have open meetings, typically around plenaries, but they’ve also held a number of workshops. There will be an audience and participation workshop coming up in December that Dan Cohen will host in the DC area, the November Appfest Hackathon aimed at technical folks, and more. The metadata schema—first draft—has been released and we are seeking feedback from the community. I think the DPLA has done a fairly good job of engaging the community and creating ways for it to remain involved.”
From the Council on Library and Information Resources Issues article of the September/October 2012 journal, DPLA: Looking Forward, Interview with Emily Gore