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.

This post by Franky Abbott gives an update on the work of the first class of community reps to give readers a sense of how the program works.

It’s hard to believe that a year has already gone by since our launch last April. It’s been a whirlwind here in the Boston headquarters of DPLA, and across DPLA’s ever-expanding national network of libraries, archives, museums, and cultural heritage sites. The surging numbers in our collection—6.7 million items from over 1300 contributing institutions, up from 2.4 million and 500 a year ago—attest to the tremendous momentum we’ve achieved.

The U.S. Copyright Office has asked for comments on a proposed new right for copyright holders, the “making available” right, which would restrict the ability to link to content the open web. With the help of DPLA Legal Committee member Dave Hansen, Dan Cohen filed a response.

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.

We got such a terrific response to our first call for applications for the DPLA Community Reps program that we’ve decided to do it again! Today, we’ve opened applications for a second class of Reps that will close April 30.

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.”

A guest post by Jennie Benford, Programming Director for the Homewood Cemetery Historical Fund in Pittsburgh, PA. I am an archivist and my area of expertise is historic American cemeteries. I am paid to design tours, publications, and programs based on the history of the cemetery. Not just the people there, of whom there are […]

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.

As our current users know, the depth of the riches in the DPLA sees no bounds. So, today we’re launching http://digitalpubliclibraryofamerica.tumblr.com/ to bring these riches to new audiences on tumblr.

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?