Unless you haven’t been out of your house for the past month, you know that it’s Girl Scout cookie season. The girls out tugging boxes of cookies around the neighborhood are learning all sorts of skills they’ll use later in life as political leaders, entertainers, astronauts, and athletes. Literally. For proof, check out this list of 25 of the most famous Girl Scouts while enjoying the last of your Thin Mints and Caramel Delights…until next year.

The DPLA family was devastated to hear that one of our Community Reps, Sabra Statham, passed away suddenly on Friday. Sabra was a Digital Project Coordinator at Pennsylvania State University and had joined the Reps program in 2014 as part of the second class. In the last year, she worked enthusiastically to represent DPLA in conversation with local Pennsylvania genealogy groups and in collaboration with her fellow Pennsylvania reps. She was multitalented: in addition to her innovative work in the library at Penn State, she was an accomplished musician and a scholar of musical modernism.

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).

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.

Interested in using DPLA to do family research, but aren’t sure where to start? Consider the family Bible. There are two large family Bible collections in DPLA—over 2,100 (transcribed) from the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources, and another 90 from the South Carolina Digital Library. They’re filled with rich information about family connections and provide insight into how people of the American South lived and died during the—mainly—18th and 19th centuries.

There are so many ways to get involved with the Digital Public Library of America, each of which contributes enormously to our mission of connecting people with our shared cultural heritage. Obviously we have our crucial hubs and institutional partners, who work closely with us to bring their content to the world. If you’re a software developer, you can build upon our code, write your own, and create apps that help to spread that content far and wide. And if you want to provide financial support, that’s easy too.

This is the second post in our new series, Unexpected, which covers thematic discoveries in our collection. Bringing together over 15,000 photographs of football, from its origins after the Civil War to Super Bowl era, and from over a thousand collections around the United States, presents an opportunity to see in one place how this uniquely American sport has been played—and imagined. Photography itself evolved in concert with the sport, from lantern slides of players to aerial shots of stadiums.

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.

Today we’re starting a new series on our blog, called Unexpected. With over eight million items in our collection (and growing!), there are countless unusual artifacts, and since we now bring together 1,400 different libraries, archives, museums, and cultural heritage sites in one place, we can begin to associate these surprising sources into rich categories and themes. Unexpected will showcase some of the most, well, unexpected, items and topics—just the tip of the DPLA iceberg. We hope the series inspires you to explore our collection further, to tell others about DPLA, and to use our materials for education, research, and just plain fun.

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.

Looking back, 2013 was characterized by a start-up mode: hiring staff, getting the site and infrastructure live, and bringing on a first slate of states and collection. 2014 was a year in which we juggled so much: many new hubs, partners, and content, lining up additional future contributors, and beginning to restructure our technology behind the scenes to prepare for an even more expansive collection and network. Beginning this year, and with the release of our strategic plan for the next three years, we will show how DPLA is hitting its stride. We encourage you to read the plan to see what’s in store, but also to know that it will require your help and support; so much in the plan is community-driven, and will be done with that same emphasis on widespread and productive collaboration.

The Digital Public Library of America seeks applicants to serve as Service Hubs and Content Hubs in our growing national network. The applications and corresponding instructions are now available.

University of Washington MLIS graduate Greg Bem writes about his experience developing a new exhibit for DPLA—”From Colonialism to Tourism: Maps in American Culture”—as part of the Digital Curation Program. The new exhibit is now available on dp.la/exhibitions.

Heather Harren, Education and Outreach Manager at the Blue Earth County Historical Society in Mankato, MN, describes the national attention that has been brought to her organization through their participation as a contributor to the Minnesota Digital Library and DPLA.

It’s the first day of school for most kids in the United States, and so a good time to highlight the resources the Digital Public Library of America has ready and waiting for students and teachers this school year. Just like kids, DPLA spent the summer growing and maturing, adding new partners, new staff, and over a half-million items along the way. And we’ve been thinking a lot about how we can be most helpful in the classroom; this fall we will be talking to many educators from K-12 through college to get their advice.

Bob Sandeen describes the Nicollet County Historical Society’s experience as a contributing institution to the Minnesota Digital Library and the DPLA.

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.

Patricia Maus discusses her experiences at the University of Minnesota Duluth as a contributing institution to the Minnesota Digital Library and the DPLA.

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.

Stephen Zietz is the Head of Special Collections and Archives at Georgia State University. The department has a staff of six professional librarian/archivists and four paraprofessionals and is distributed across campus in five locations. Over the last six years, Special Collections and Archives has expanded it collections scope and reenergized its oral history program.