The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) is pleased to announce a new $622,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support strengthening and expanding its national cultural heritage network and platform.

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) is pleased to announce that the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has awarded DPLA a $1.5 million grant. The grant will enable DPLA to expand its efforts to provide an improved ebook experience for libraries and their patrons, building on its cultural heritage aggregation program.

Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) is very pleased to announce the release of its second group of Primary Source Sets about topics in US history, literature, and culture, along with new features for navigating our growing project.

Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) is very pleased to announce the release of its first group of Primary Source Sets about topics in US history, literature, and culture. These sets were developed and reviewed by a new Education Advisory Committee for use by students and teachers in grades 6-12 and higher education. Each set includes an overview, ten to fifteen primary sources, links to additional resources, and a teaching guide. This project was generously funded by the Whiting Foundation.

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.

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 looking for excellent educators for its new Education Advisory Committee. We recently announced a new grant from the Whiting Foundation that funds the creation of new primary source-based education resources for student use with teacher guidance. We are currently recruiting a small group of enthusiastic humanities educators in grades 6-14 to collaborate with us on this project.

Over the past twelve months representatives from Europeana, the DPLA and Creative Commons have been exploring the possibilities for a collaborative approach to rights statements that can be used to communicate the copyright status of cultural objects published via our platforms. This work is close to the heart of both Europeana and the DPLA as we both seek to share clear and accurate information about copyright status with users.

DPLA releases a research paper based on its Whiting-funded education project. The paper details findings about existing online education resources and educator needs, and recommendations for an education strategy.

At the DPLA, we are particularly enthusiastic about the role that our large and expanding national network of hubs can play. Many of our service hubs have already scanned books from their regions, and are generously sharing them through DPLA. Public domain works are being aggregated by content hubs such as HathiTrust, with more coming online every month. It is clear that we can bring these threads together to create a richer, broader tapestry of ebooks for readers of all ages and interests.

In April 2014, after research and planning, the Public Library Partnerships Project team started to convene one-day workshops for public librarians interested in digitization. Each hub—Digital Commonwealth, Digital Library of Georgia, Minnesota Digital Library, and Mountain West Digital Library—gave a workshop in the spring. We then met as group to discuss the curriculum and make necessary changes for the later workshops. We also relied on feedback from participants in the first workshops and the survey and informal feedback they had offered about their experiences. Since that meeting, we’ve continue to give workshops: so far eight more with an additional five scheduled through the end of September.

Read about DPLA’s entry to the Knight Foundation’s News Challenge, “Getting it Right on Rights: Simplifying, Harmonizing, and Maximizing the Openness of Rights in Digital Libraries around the World.”

Recently, DPLA teamed up with our colleagues and friends at Europeana and Kennisland to promote global interoperability of our metadata, and specifically our Rights Statement fields. In October 2013, Europeana and the DPLA organized a first joint rights management workshop to explore this possibility in Boston.

With generous funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the DPLA is working on the Public Library Partnerships Project, in collaboration with Service Hubs and their local public libraries, that offers digital skills training to public librarians. Project manager Franky Abbott gives an update on current project work and future goals.