On January 22, at 2 pm eastern, we will be hosting a webinar about metadata aggregation. We’ll be taking an inside look at aggregation best practices at two of our DPLA Service Hubs in North Carolina and South Carolina. In addition, DPLA has been working on improving our existing tools as well as creating some new ones for metadata aggregation and quality control.We’d like to share what’s in place and preview some of our plans and we hope to get feedback on future directions.

The DPLA Technical Advisory Committee will lead an open committee call on Wednesday, December 3 at 2:00 PM Eastern.

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.

The Technical Advisory Committee will hold an open call on Tuesday, September 23 at 1:00 PM EDT. The agenda is now available.

The DPLA is pleased to announce an update to the Metadata Application Profile (MAP). The DPLA MAP is the basis for how data is structured and validated in DPLA, and guides how data is stored, serialized, and made available through our API in JSON-LD. The MAP is based on the Europeana Data Model (EDM), and integrates the experience and specific needs for aggregating the data of America’s cultural heritage institutions.

In this guest post, DPLA Community Rep and digital collections consultant Danielle Cunniff Plumer describes her recent work building Omeka exhibitions using DPLA and organizing a hackathon at the Texas Conference on Digital Libraries.

We are often asked about our metadata application profile (called the DPLA MAP) and the metadata “requirements” for participation in DPLA. In response, we released a new document, “An Introduction to the DPLA metadata model,” which offers a detailed introduction to the DPLA MAP, describes how we harvest metadata, and outlines the types of metadata that our partners provide us.

DPLA is committed to making cultural heritage materials held in America’s libraries, archives, and museums freely available to all, and we provide maximally open data to encourage transformative uses of those materials by developers. In addition, DPLA is also proud to distribute the software we produce to support our mission to the wider community. In this post, Director for Technology Mark Matienzo details DPLA’s engagement with free and open source software.

At DPLA, we’ve been thinking a lot about what’s involved with serendipitous discovery. Since we started from scratch and didn’t need to create a standard online library catalog experience, we were free to experiment and provide novel ways into our collection of over five million items. How to arrange a collection of that scale so that different users can bump into items of unexpected interest to them?

I just returned from several days in Philadelphia where I attended the American Library Association Midwinter conference. About 7,000 folks attended Midwinter, but that’s nothing compared to ALA Annual, which typically brings upwards of 30,000 people together to think and talk about libraries, open access, privacy, maker spaces, technology, and information provision and consumption. Always fascinating, the Philly conference was no different.

On January 22, 2014 Tiltfactor Laboratory launched Metadata Games: Mobile, a digital game platform for gathering useful data on image, audio, and moving image artifacts. Metadata Games seeks to increase access to humanities content while contributing to vital records, and further enables archivists, librarians, data scientists and a slew of other people to gather and analyze information for archives in powerful and innovative ways.

Interested in building with the DPLA API? Then come to LibHack! LibHack, taking place on January 24, 2014, is a library hackathon that will work with the DPLA and OCLC APIs.

DPLA staff was pleased to hear that the Cultural Center of Novi Sad, located in Novi Sad, Serbia, recently launched a gorgeous new digital heritage platform using DPLA’s open source technology.

This is a reminder that our next open committee call will take place on Wednesday, December 4 at 2:00 PM Eastern. Topics related to the Technical Advisory committee will serve as the subject of this call.

While our nearly 20 workshops at this year’s DPLAfest covered a wide range of topics (which you can recap using the conference live notes), a major theme in both presentations and discussions centered around using the DPLA’s API and metadata—specifically, how users can be involved in using that data, while also helping to clean it up in a way that is vetted and accurate. It was a subject that was interwoven into a variety of workshops throughout the day on October 25.

After five days and nights of intense collaboration, the One Week | One Tool digital humanities team has unveiled its web application: Serendip-o-matic <http://serendipomatic.org>. Unlike conventional search tools, this “serendipity engine” takes in any text, such as an article, song lyrics, or a bibliography. It then extracts key terms, delivering similar results from the vast […]

The site was updated last week with some requested features including better accessibility, stronger refinement functionality on the timeline, an option to make your lists public to other users, and a host of smaller bug fixes.

The DPLA will participate in the first ever National Day of Civic Hacking, a national event that will take place on June 1-2 in cities across the nation.