News Archive

181 posts found by [object Object]. Showing page 7 of 10.

DPLA staff attend LDCX at Stanford University

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.

April 5, 2016

Curation Corps 2016: Help Us Continue Growing Open eBooks

Two weeks ago we were thrilled to join The New York Public Library, First Book, and Baker & Taylor in announcing the launch of Open eBooks, an app containing thousands of popular and award-winning titles that are free for children from low-income households. You may be wondering: what was DPLA’s role in all of this?

March 9, 2016

Maximizing Access to eBooks

Since our launch almost three years ago, the Digital Public Library of America has sought to maximize access to our shared culture. Thanks to our many library, archive, and museum partners, we’ve been able to share over 11 million items, including a wide range of artifacts, documents, artworks, photographs, audiovisual materials, and, of course, many books.

February 24, 2016

Color Our Collections!

Join the adult coloring craze and put your colorful spin on these illustrations from our collection.

February 1, 2016

New Primary Source Sets for Education Published

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.

January 20, 2016

New Primary Source Sets for Education

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.

October 20, 2015

Unexpected: Getting Fit (the 19th Century Way)

This month will mark the 111th annual World Series of Baseball. As the final teams of the National and American Leagues battle it out in their divisional series, DPLA takes a look back at a type of publication that arose during baseball’s formative years: 19th century sports or fitness manuals.

October 15, 2015

Archival Description Working Group Members

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.

October 9, 2015

New Self-Guided Curriculum for Digitization

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.

October 7, 2015

Humanities for All of Us: The NEH at 50

Sunday night there wasn’t a cloud in the sky in Boston, and so we were fortunate to get a clear view of the rare supermoon eclipse. I took a telescope out to the backyard with my kids and we worked to line up the equipment, and then we chatted about astronomy, optics, and physics, umbras and penumbras. A moment of science? Yes, but ultimately much more.

September 29, 2015

DPLA Archival Description Working Group

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.

September 4, 2015

Seeking Balance in Copyright and Access

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.

July 30, 2015

We, Robots: Robots from the 1920s to the 1990s

This is the third post in our Unexpected series which covers thematic discoveries in our collection. In case you missed it, the first post covered unusual snow removal machines, while the second covered football.

June 16, 2015

Call for Educator Participants

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.

June 15, 2015

The principles for establishing international & interoperable rights statements

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.

May 11, 2015

DPLA and HathiTrust Partnership Supports Open E-Book Programs

The Digital Public Library of America and HathiTrust have had a strong relationship since DPLA’s inception in 2013. As part of our ongoing collaboration to host and make digitized books widely available, we are now working to see how we can provide our services to exciting new initiatives that bring ebooks to everyone.

April 21, 2015

DPLAfest in Light of SEA 101

In my social media feeds yesterday, I saw some friends and acquaintances say that they were reconsidering their attendance at DPLAfest, scheduled to be held in Indianapolis, IN, April 17-18, in light of the recent signing of SEA 101, or the “Religious Freedom Restoration Act,” into law by Governor Pence of Indiana. I must admit that as an openly gay employee at DPLA, I had an immediate and strong negative reaction. I was unhappy about my organization spending money in a place that would allow businesses not to serve me simply because I am gay. However, after more thought and a night of sleep, I have come to a different conclusion. The passing of this law should make us all want to attend DPLAfest even more than we might have before.

March 27, 2015