In 2015, DPLA announced the formation of the Archival Description Working Group to find ways to accommodate this diversity in descriptive practice within our data. Today that group is releasing its whitepaper, “Aggregating and Representing Collections in the Digital Public Library of America.”

As our newest Service Hub, Recollection Wisconsin has made some 400,000 new records representing photographs, books, maps, artifacts and other historical resources from more than 200 Wisconsin collections accessible in DPLA.

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) and FamilySearch International, the largest genealogy organization in the world, have signed an agreement that will expand access to FamilySearch.org’s growing free digital historical book collection to DPLA’s broad audience of users including genealogists, researchers, family historians, students, and more.

We’re pleased to invite our extended community to attend a free two-part DPLA workshop webinar, RightsStatements.org: Why We Need It, What It Is (and Isn’t) and What Does It Mean for the DPLA Network and Beyond? Over the course of two workshops, Emily Gore, DPLA, and Greg Cram, NYPL, will discuss the recently launched RightsStatements.org project.

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 first of two guest posts by our special correspondents, Sara Stephenson, Kerry Dunne, and Emily Pfotenhauer reflect on their fest experiences from the perspectives of their fields and interests: education, ebooks, and the growing DPLA hub network.

The Digital Public Library of America and Europeana are proud to announce the launch of RightsStatements.org, developed in partnership with Creative Commons, Kennisland and key stakeholders of the DPLA and Europeana networks. RightsStatements.org is a collaborative approach to rights statements that can be used to communicate the copyright status of cultural objects.

The Digital Public Library of America is partnering with Pop Up Archive to offer discounted services to the DPLA network. DPLA Hubs and their partners will be able to take advantage of this discounted rate to make it possible for anyone to search and pinpoint exact search terms and phrases within audiovisual collections.

Fifty years ago this October, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 was signed into law, forever changing American immigration policy and the country’s demographics. The 1965 law abolished quota systems established in the 1920s that put restrictions on earlier waves of immigration, and allowed for many groups of non-European immigrants to enter the country.

We are pleased to announce the membership of the Archival Description Working Group. In addition, we have appointed an Advisory Board that will help the workgroup by reviewing drafts before public release and providing feedback on workplans and tools.

Through the Public Library Partnerships Project (PLPP), DPLA has been working with existing DPLA Service Hubs to provide digital skills training for public librarians and connect them sustainably with state and regional resources for digitizing, describing, and exhibiting their cultural heritage content. Through the project workshops, we used this curriculum to introduce 150 public librarians to the digitization process. Now at the end of the project, we’ve made this curriculum available in a self-guided version intended for digitization beginners from a variety of cultural heritage institutions.

Over the past fifteen months, representatives from the Europeana and DPLA networks, in partnership with Creative Commons, have been developing a collaborative approach to internationally interoperable rights statements that can be used to communicate the copyright status of cultural objects published via the DPLA and Europeana platforms.

Wouldn’t libraries and archives like to be able to digitize their collections and make the texts and images available to the world online? Of course they would, but copyright inhibits this for most works created in the last 100 years.

The U.S. Copyright Office recently issued a report and a request for comments on its proposal for a new licensing system intended overcome copyright obstacles to mass digitization. While the goal is laudable, the Office’s proposal is troubling and vague in key respects.

At DPLA, our metadata application profile and access platform have been centered on an item-centric library model for description: one metadata record for each individual digital object. While this method works well for most of the items in DPLA, it doesn’t translate to the way many archives are creating records for their digital objects. Instead, these institutions are applying an aggregate description to their objects. Since DPLA works with organizations that use both the item-level and aggregation-based description practices, we need a way to support both. The Archival Description Working Group will help us get there.

DPLA is pleased to announce the publication of 10 new exhibitions created by DPLA Hubs and public librarian participants in our Gates-funded Public Library Partnerships Project (PLPP).

The Digital Public Library of America is pleased to announce the addition of four Service Hubs that will be joining our Hub network. The Hubs represent Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The addition of these Hubs continues our efforts to help build local community and capacity, and further efforts to build an on-ramp to DPLA participation for every cultural heritage institution in the United States and its territories.

The most important word in discussions around copyright in the United States is balance. Although there are many, often strong disagreements between copyright holders and those who wish to provide greater access to our cultural heritage, few dispute that the goal is to balance the interests of the public with those of writers, artists, and other creators.

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) is on the way to connecting online collections from coast to coast by 2017 – an effort boosted by a new $3.4 million investment, comprising $1.9 million from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and $1.5 million from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. These two new awards, coupled with significant earlier support from the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the National Endowment for the Humanities, will allow DPLA to open new Service Hubs that provide a way for all cultural heritage organizations across the country to connect through one national collection.

The Digital Public Library of America seeks applicants to serve as Service Hubs in our growing national network.

In this post, Anna Neatrour describes one of her typical days as the Mountain West Digital Library metadata librarian aggregating data on a regional level and as a Service Hub with DPLA.

Within the Technical Working Group of the International Rights Statements Working Group, we have been focusing our efforts on identifying a set of requirements and a technically sound and sustainable plan to implement the rights statements under development. Now that two of the Working Group’s white papers have been released, we realized it was a good time to build on the introductory blog post by our Co-Chairs, Emily Gore and Paul Keller. Accordingly, we hope this post provides a good introduction to our technical white paper, Recommendations for the Technical Infrastructure for Standardized International Rights Statements, and more generally, how our thinking has changed throughout the activities of the working group.