Press: “My Day at DPLA – Part I & II”

“Today I had the pleasure of attending the Digital Public Library of America plenary session at the National Archives and Records Administration.  It was one of those moments where you see something and you instantly know that this is going to be huge.  The heaviest hitters in library science and digital access were there in full force, all of them throwing their support at this new coordinated initiative that, if successful, will revolutionize digital access to not only the United States, but to the world.  And I’m not just saying that, I really, really believe that this is going to be an utterly transformative movement in the world of internet culture.

[…]

“This project is going to revolutionize the web for one very simple reason.  Metadata.  We have been living in a world where blunt force, raw searching yields millions of useless hits.  The value of a service like the DPLA is that it is in fact curated by librarians, archivists, museum curators, as well as the public who volunteer their efforts to make it relevant.  This is the hybrid of the old school library catalog and the new school wiki pages, where we have expert metadata people working round the clock to make things accessible, and average people dedicating their personal knowledge and time to make that metadata even more relevant.  This is going to fundamentally change how we use the web, because I will guarantee you that website owners are going to want to get in on this somehow.  And that means that they are going to have to generate metadata for their work to make it accessible and relevant to the collection, and then the users of those sites are going to curate the hell out of them.  Is that Web 3.0?  2.5?  I don’t know, but it’s a radical shift in an excitingly old/new way.”

From Eric Riley’s posts on Eric S. Riley: Librarian Exploring the Future, My Day at DPLA – Part I & Part II