Press: “Libraries: Together or Apart”

“Distributed content might be an appealing vision even at the scale of DPLA, where a wide range of digital treasures reside at local public libraries, archives, and museums. These disparate sources can be aggregated in a metadata index for discovery, with access policies supporting the curated replication of subsets in any number of locations. For each community library, its own locally relevant digital library.

[…]

“Beyond that, large aggregations permit multiplier effects through additive services that work at scale, including social recommending, semantic applications that apply thesauri and ontologies to repositories, and the ability to form attachments to other network-based collections. While some network affordances could be associated with smaller, distributed library caches, the initiation cost and management of information resource attachment or linkage can be significant, and is arguably best achieved at the highest possible level of aggregation. This is the motivation for the partnership between DPLA and Europeana – global services are hard to knit together at the level of community.”

From Peter Brantley’s post on PWxyz, Libraries: Together or Apart