Yesterday we shared the news that we and our partners at LYRASIS have created The Palace Project to develop and scale a robust suite of content, services, and tools for the delivery of ebooks, audiobooks, and other digital media to benefit public libraries and patrons. The Palace Project is made possible by a generous $5 million award by Knight Foundation.

A powerful partnership of industry leaders today announced The Palace Project, a transformational, library-centered platform for digital content and services. The Palace Project, with a $5 million investment by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation for LYRASIS, and in strategic partnership with Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), will develop and scale a robust suite of content, services, and tools for the delivery of ebooks, audiobooks, and other digital media to benefit public libraries and patrons.

DPLA is offering opportunities for library professionals and students to join our Curation Corps. The DPLA Curation Corps is a group of librarians and information professionals who help to curate our Open Bookshelf offering of public domain and other freely accessible ebooks, as well as assist in creating books for DPLA’s ebook projects. DPLA relies on the expertise of the library community to create collections patrons will love. Curation Corps tasks and working sessions vary depending on current project needs. Open Bookshelf is generously funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Digital Public Library of America is pleased to announce that more than 50,000 new cultural heritage artifacts from the Orbis Cascade Alliance are now available at dp.la. The Orbis Cascade is a consortium of 37 academic libraries in the Pacific Northwest. The Alliance’s first hub submissions include cultural resources contributed by member institutions in Oregon, Washington, and Idaho.

The DPLA team is pleased to share the news that Director of Community Engagement Shaneé Yvette Murrain has been named one of Library Journal’s Movers & Shakers for 2021.

We hope you’ll join us at our upcoming events this June! Our Community + Open Board Meeting will be held on June 11th, and on June 17th, we’ll host theoretical physicist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein for a DPLA Book Talk.

Last week we shared the news that DPLA has signed an agreement with Amazon Publishing to bring their ebooks and audiobooks to the DPLA Exchange, our not-for-profit, library-centered ebooks marketplace.

DPLA is pleased to welcome Northwest Digital Heritage as DPLA’s newest service hub. Northwest Digital Heritage is a collaboration between the Washington State Library, State Library of Oregon, and Oregon Heritage Commission that serves libraries and cultural heritage institutions across the Pacific Northwest region. More than 70 institutions are currently contributing to DPLA through Northwest […]

How can artificial intelligence and machine learning help organize, describe, and provide access to the growing volume of materials in digital libraries and archives? This was the central question of a workshop series hosted by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and the University Libraries at Virginia Tech (VT).

Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) is pleased to announce that we have signed an agreement with Amazon Publishing to make all of the approximately 10,000 Amazon Publishing ebooks and audiobooks available to libraries and their patrons through the DPLA Exchange, the only not-for-profit, library-centered content marketplace. This marks the first time that ebooks from Amazon Publishing have been made available to libraries. Like our previous publisher arrangements, this agreement furthers our mission to expand equitable access to ebooks and audiobooks while protecting library patron privacy.

Thank you to everyone who joined us on Wednesday for our 2021 Members Meeting around building inclusion in a digital world and our network’s IDEAS (inclusion, diversity, equity, access, and social justice) work. We so enjoyed re-connecting with all of you and learning about your efforts to turn the corner from talking about equity and inclusion to actually determining what that means to every aspect of our work, from search and discovery to metadata to partnerships. We were inspired by your energy, enthusiasm, and thoughtfulness about the path ahead of us.

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) Board of Directors Nominating Committee is seeking nominations of people to serve three-year terms as DPLA directors. This is an opportunity for professionals in the fields of libraries, education, museums, technology, publishing, law, philanthropy, media, activism, and the arts to help guide the organization as we work toward our mission of maximizing access to our shared history, culture, and knowledge.

DPLA’s ebooks program serves our mission of maximizing access to digital content by giving libraries across the country greater control over their acquisition and delivery of ebooks and audiobooks

We are pleased to invite you to join us at the inaugural DPLA Book Talk, which will feature a conversation between Mistrust author Ethan Zuckerman and Wikimedia Foundation CEO and DPLA board member Katherine Maher, moderated by Knight Foundation CEO Alberto Ibargüen.

With expanded vaccine access, many of us have begun to conceive of what our post-Covid worlds might look like. These visions are necessarily colored by all that we have learned during the last year—from the benefits of flexible working arrangements to the urgent need to finally dismantle systemic racism in our work.

Just a year ago, the world of work underwent a seismic shift as a result of the COVID pandemic. DPLA, in some ways, was more ready for this kind of change than other teams — we were already distributed across the country, so we had already built the remote-working muscles needed to get things done during quarantine. And 99% of our operations were virtual as well, leaving essentially the main tangible change to be figuring out how to collect the mail.

Early last year, DPLA embarked on a new project, supported by Sloan Foundation, to make images from DPLA’s aggregation of more than 40 million cultural heritage artifacts accessible to vast new audiences via Wikimedia. January 2021 marked the one-year anniversary of this project, and we wanted to share with you some of the exciting outcomes thus far:

This is the fourth and final post in a series from DPLA’s Audrey Altman about the curatorial and technological challenges involved in the development of the Black Women’s Suffrage Digital Collection. As a data engineer, Audrey worked alongside the curators Shaneé Yvette Murrain and Kathleen Williams to address underlying biases in the collection and surface representative stories about Black women’s contributions to voting rights movements.

This is the third in a series of posts from DPLA’s Audrey Altman about the curatorial and technological challenges involved in the development of the Black Women’s Suffrage Digital Collection.

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) is pleased to announce that we are now offering an ebook creation service to libraries. This new service, provided in partnership with Digital Divide Data (DDD), gives libraries the ability to easily and affordably digitize and reformat texts to create ebooks in EPUB format from print materials that are in the public domain or for which the library owns the copyright.