We are extremely excited to introduce and officially welcome our fifth class of DPLA Community Reps! Community Reps are a network of volunteers across the country who help connect DPLA with their communities through outreach, both in person and online.

We are pleased to announce that the application for the fifth class of the DPLA Community Reps program is now open! Learn more below, tell a friend or colleague, and complete the application form to apply by April 24, 2017.

We’re pleased to invite our extended community to attend a free DPLA workshop webinar — Using DPLA for Genealogy and Family Research, taking place on July 26, 2016 at 3:00pm EST.

With DPLAfest 2016 larger than ever, we reached out to a few attendees ahead of the event to help us capture the (many) diverse experiences of fest participants. These ‘special correspondents’ have graciously volunteered to share their personal perspectives on the fest. In this second guest post by our special correspondents, Kristen Yarmey and Patrick Murray-John, both of whom are part of the DPLA Community Reps program reflect on their fest experiences from the perspectives of their fields and interests: the growth of DPLA and its network and sharing and creative reuse of cultural heritage materials.

We are extremely excited to introduce and welcome our fourth class of DPLA Community Reps–-volunteers who engage their local communities by leading DPLA outreach activities.

We’re thrilled to announce today our fourth call for applications for the DPLA Community Reps program! The application for this fourth class of Reps will close on Friday, February 19, 2016.

Thanks to the excellent work of DPLA Community Rep Shaun Akhtar (thanks, Shaun!), Firefox and Internet Explorer users can make use of a new OpenSearch plugin that will add the DPLA as one of your browser’s known search providers. Firefox users may also install it directly through the Mozilla Add-ons site. This is valuable because it gets you to DPLA content faster and more often.

Earlier this month it was announced the President Barack Obama’s Presidential Library will be built on the south side of Chicago. It will be our 14th Presidential Library. The idea originated with FDR who in his second term “on the advice of noted historians and scholars, established a public repository to preserve the evidence of the Presidency for future generations” Then in 1955, Congress passed the Presidential Libraries Act, establishing a system of privately erected and federally maintained libraries. Here’s a sampling of images from the Digital Public Library of America related to our presidents and their libraries.

Happy National Poetry Month! Here’s a taste of just some of the poetry goodness that lives within the confines of the Digital Public Library of America. From the postcard featuring an excerpt from a poem by Alex Caldero proclaiming ‘Poetry is wanted here!’, to a sampling a of dust jackets, to a lunch poem from second graders, poetry is alive and well at DPLA.

The DPLA family was devastated to hear that one of our Community Reps, Sabra Statham, passed away suddenly on Friday. Sabra was a Digital Project Coordinator at Pennsylvania State University and had joined the Reps program in 2014 as part of the second class. In the last year, she worked enthusiastically to represent DPLA in conversation with local Pennsylvania genealogy groups and in collaboration with her fellow Pennsylvania reps. She was multitalented: in addition to her innovative work in the library at Penn State, she was an accomplished musician and a scholar of musical modernism.

We’re extremely excited to announce our third class of DPLA Community Reps–volunteers who engage their local communities by leading DPLA outreach activities. We were thrilled with the response to our third call for applicants, and we’re pleased to now add another roster of nearly 100 new Community Reps to our outstanding first and second classes, bringing the total number of Reps to just over 200.

There are so many ways to get involved with the Digital Public Library of America, each of which contributes enormously to our mission of connecting people with our shared cultural heritage. Obviously we have our crucial hubs and institutional partners, who work closely with us to bring their content to the world. If you’re a software developer, you can build upon our code, write your own, and create apps that help to spread that content far and wide. And if you want to provide financial support, that’s easy too.

We’re thrilled to announce today our third-ever call for applications for the DPLA Community Reps program! The application window for this third class of Reps will close on Friday, February 13.

This post is part of a series from Book Patrol, a blog run by DPLA Community Rep Michael Lieberman that highlights interesting news, images, and related content from all corners of the book universe. To learn more about Book Patrol, visit http://bookpatrol.net/

This year DPLA is an official sponsor of National History Day in Missouri. With the excellent assistance of the DPLA staff, teaching guides and materials were prepared sharing DPLA resources related to this year’s theme: Leadership and Legacy in History. Also a prize was created for the student whose work made the best use of DPLA-related resources at the state finals next spring. My simple hope is these young folks will move from searching online, to helping get the history of our state online. Otherwise we may lose much near-history of the Show-Me State or have it hidden to others.

This post is part of a series from Book Patrol, a blog run by DPLA Community Rep Michael Lieberman that highlights interesting news, images, and related content from all corners of the book universe. In this post, Michael relates a couple of recent Oscar Wilde related happenings and archival holdings available for your perusal through DPLA. To learn more about Book Patrol, visit http://bookpatrol.net/

As a Community Rep for Vermont, I introduced Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) to employees of the Veterans Affairs Medical Center (VAMC) in White River Junction, Vermont, during its Disability Employment Awareness event on October 16, 2014. I have been volunteering at VAMC this year in order to contribute toward programs that benefit current and retired members of the U.S. Armed Forces and their families. Bringing DPLA to veterans and civilians with disabilities was my first effort as the Community Rep to bridge digital divides among under-represented populations. The event’s motto “Expect. Employ. Empower.” was about creating a society of inclusion, thus it seemed to be a perfect fit for DPLA.

This is the first in a new series of posts from Book Patrol, a blog run by DPLA Community Rep Michael Lieberman that highlights interesting news, images, and related content from all corners of the book universe. Over the coming weeks and months, Michael will scour the DPLA for interesting archival finds and publish them here and on our Tumblr. To learn more about Book Patrol, visit http://bookpatrol.net/

We’re excited to announce the release of a new Community Reps-produced resource, GLAM Hack-in-a-box, a short guide to organizing and convening a hackathon using cultural heritage data from GLAM organizations (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums) including DPLA. We hope this guide will serve as a useful resource for those either unfamiliar with or inexperienced in pulling together a hackathon.

Every February I receive an all staff work email titled, “Packaging Clients Needed!” I work at Dunwoody College of Technology in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The email is sent out from Dunwoody’s Design & Packaging Technology, Introduction to Packaging Design class, which focuses on cardboard and paperboard packaging of products. The teacher, Pete Rivard, asks Dunwoody staff to be “clients” and each bring in an item for which a student can design and manufacture a package that would market the item. I presented to the class that I wanted a box of some sort to carry the DPLA swag (stickers, pins and pens) to the different places I intended to be presenting about the DPLA. None of the students had heard of the DPLA, so I spent time talking about the DPLA mission and what the site offers. I said that I wanted to be able to walk into a training, DPLA caddy in hand, ready for action…