We are pleased to announce the re-launch of DPLA’s API (Application Programming Interface). This marks the first time since 2013 that our API has had a significant software upgrade.

We are pleased to announce a new website feature that allows users to create lists of items from across the Digital Public Library of America’s collections. With this new tool, users can easily save great materials discovered on DPLA’s website to come back to again and again without having to repeat a search.

Last month DPLA released an update to our Metadata Application Profile (MAP), bringing us up to version 5.0. DPLA Data Services Coordinator Gretchen Gueguen explains the new features in MAP 5.0 and how they will impact our website, services, and partners.

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.”

Four DPLA staff members recently attended LDCX at Stanford University. The annual conference is a chance for those in the library, archive, and museum (LAM) communities who work with technology to collaborate on solutions to common problems.

Hot on the heels of last week’s announcement of KriKri and Heidrun, we here at DPLA HQ are excited to release the newest revision of the DPLA Metadata Application Profile, version 4.0 (DPLA MAP v4.0).

Thanks to all of you who attended our webinar. We had a great turnout and hope you found it interesting and informative. As promised, you can now find the video for our recent Metadata Aggregation webinar below or over at our Vimeo account. Links to download each presenter’s slides are included in this post as well. Unfortunately, we didn’t have enough time to get to all of the questions that came up during the webinar. However, our presenters agreed to answer a few more in writing for our blog. You can find them below in the Extended Q&A section.

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 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.

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.

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.