🥂 So Much Accomplished, So Much More to Come

By DPLA, December 20, 2024.

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A Year-End Note from the Staff of DPLA

Here at DPLA, we are capping off an eventful 2024 and looking forward to an even more momentous year to come.

We’re reflecting on all we’ve accomplished this year. Here are some highlights:

In May, DPLA celebrated a tremendous milestone: our landmark, cultural heritage aggregation program reached more than 50 million items, a testament to our network of more than 6,000 institutions and partner hubs.

DPLA working groups hosted over a dozen webinars, virtual discussions, and coffee chats throughout the year on everything from reparative description to assessment to OpenRefine to our future with AI — and thousands of you attended our sessions.

We launched DPLA Network Office Hours, providing monthly connections with our cultural heritage team. Over the summer, we embarked on a Hub Network listening tour, surveying 24 of our hubs in just 4 weeks. Office Hours will continue in the new year — our next one is Tuesday, Jan. 14 at 2pm ET.

We relaunched our Wikimedia pipeline and, in two months, added more than 400,000 files to Wikimedia Commons. DPLA partners received a total of more than 2.5 billion page views in 2024. Indianapolis mayor Joseph H. Hogsett declared Oct. 4, 2024 to be “Wikipedia Day,” due in part to our partnership.

We made over 1,300 titles that have been removed from schools and libraries available to all Americans for free through The Banned Book Club, which is now nationwide. And, we launched the Banned Book of the Week, highlighting selected titles chosen by our Curation Corps and other librarians from around the country. We shared some of our learnings at both the Public Library Association Conference and the American Library Association Annual Conference.
We inaugurated IndieLib, a first-of-its-kind, one-day gathering that brought together independent publishers and librarians.

We launched a new, groundbreaking digital ownership model that allows libraries to purchase (rather than merely license) and own in perpetuity tens of thousands of ebook and audiobook titles from dozens of independent publishers.

We continued our successful Collaborating For Access webinar series with ReadersFirst and COSLA, hosting conversations about incorporating self-publishing into library collections and Digital Ownership.
Meanwhile, with our partners at Lyrasis, we surpassed two million ebooks and audiobooks available in the Palace Marketplace and expanded the number of publishers offering library-friendly options for access and readership.

Turning the page on ‘24, writing our new chapter in ‘25

Look for a number of exciting announcements in the new year. As we welcome new funders and build new partnerships to sustain DPLA’s legacy of work, we will have a lot of good news to share in early 2025.

We’ll be launching two new programs next year. First, we will begin a program to support the work of our existing Hub partners. Second, we’ll start a fund specifically to onboard new contributors. Both of these programs are in the early stages. We anticipate beginning to distribute funds in the second half of the year.

We will continue our ingestion work throughout the year, keeping pace with the harvest schedule (which we maintain here). And we are working to add new offers from a number of the Big Five publishers that will provide libraries with alternative licensing options through the Palace Marketplace. Speaking of which, we’ll also be adding more university presses to the Marketplace and continuing to make even more titles available for digital ownership by libraries.

Stay involved and stay tuned

Mark your calendars, we have a lot planned in 2025.

Thursday, Jan. 9: 2025 Kickoff (virtual)

Join us to be part of planning a busy new year. We want to hear your thoughts about your new programs, the return of DPLAfest, and how you want to be involved in envisioning the next stages of our work. Register here to join the conversation.

Friday, Jan. 24 – Monday, Jan. 27: LibLearnX (Phoenix)

DPLA will be at LibLearnX in late January. Join Micah May, our Director of Ebook Services, and Brooklyn Public Library’s Emma Eriksson on Saturday, Jan. 26, for a conversation about the role of libraries in countering book bans now and in the future.

Wednesday, April 16: IndieLib 2025 (NYC)

We’re hosting the second annual IndieLib 2025 in New York City on April 16, 2025. Save the date and stay tuned for more details in the new year.

And, welcome back DPLAfest!

For the first time since the pandemic, DPLAfest is coming back in the fall of 2025. We look forward to gathering our growing community of librarians, archivists, museum professionals, developers, technologists, publishers, authors, teachers, students. More details to come on this, as well.

Thank you all for your partnership this past year, and throughout this amazing project. We have an exciting future ahead, one that will not be possible without your leadership and dedication.

Happy holidays to you all!

— DPLA