DPLA is pleased to welcome the NJ/DE Digital Collective as DPLA’s newest service hub. The NJ/DE Digital Collective is a collaboration launched by the New Jersey State Library (NJSL) and Delaware Division of Libraries (DDL) that serves libraries and cultural heritage institutions throughout New Jersey and Delaware. More than 20 organizations are currently contributing to DPLA through the NJ/DE Digital Collective including NJSL, DDL, Rutgers University, the University of Delaware, Princeton Theological Seminary, and Princeton University.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

This is the second 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.

DPLA is pleased to invite members of our Hub Network to these upcoming “Brown Bag” lunch events. These 45-minute virtual get-togethers are organized around topics of interest or importance to our network and meat to be a chance to reconnect with colleagues and share information in a friendly, casual setting.

This is the first 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.

Digital Public Library of America is pleased to announce that we are beginning production on the publication of a new ebook, tentatively titled By the Quill of Her Pen: Black Suffragists in Their Own Words. This new DPLA-published ebook will be a collection of 20-30 letters, diary entries, and accompanying photographs and biographical information that […]

On January 15th, at our Open Board + Community meeting, we hosted a community conversation, Reckoning with Our Pasts + Building Our Futures, about working to live up to our common commitments to equity and inclusion in 2021 and beyond.

A Wikimedia project update, upcoming events, hub network news, and more

The Digital Public Library of America brings together resources and collections from institutions across the country, all on one easily accessible platform. Because of this, DPLA has the ability to inform people about little-known collections and resources as well help coordinate and model best practices in the library/archives field with regard to our DEI values, descriptive standards, and ethical issues pertaining to rights and intellectual property.

Join us on Friday, January 15, 2021, at 2 pm ET for our next Community + Open Board meeting. We’ll be hosting Reckoning with Our Pasts and Building Our Futures, a community conversation about the work to be done to live up to our common commitments to equity and inclusion in 2021 and beyond, as […]

Last week DPLA hosted our first (virtual) holiday reception. It was a risk– none of us had ever been to a virtual holiday reception before, and we weren’t sure exactly what we would do, or even if anyone would come. But with the encouragement of some of our friends (thanks, Keila!), we took that risk, and ended up with a gathering of more than 40 public librarians, college and middle school educators, technologists and funders. We were joined by DPLA founders, longtime collaborators, and people whom we only met this year. I was reminded of the value of taking risks; the collective effort that is DPLA is itself a risk. And I was struck, as I have been so many times this year, by the breadth, dedication, and resilience of the extended DPLA community. With that in mind, I wanted to reflect on some of our achievements this year.