The Medical Heritage Library (MHL) is pleased to announce that MHL content can now be discovered through the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). The MHL, a specialized research collection stored in the Internet Archive, currently includes nearly 60,000 digital rare books, serials, audio and video recordings, and ephemera in the history of medicine, public health, biomedical sciences, and popular medicine from the medical special collections of 22 academic, special, and public libraries.

The DPLA Board and its Finance Committee each held an open conference call in September 2014. Both of these calls were open to the public.

A cross-posted blogpost from the Imgur.com blog (published on September 8, 2014). Thanks, Imgur, for having us this summer!

Every February I receive an all staff work email titled, “Packaging Clients Needed!” I work at Dunwoody College of Technology in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The email is sent out from Dunwoody’s Design & Packaging Technology, Introduction to Packaging Design class, which focuses on cardboard and paperboard packaging of products. The teacher, Pete Rivard, asks Dunwoody staff to be “clients” and each bring in an item for which a student can design and manufacture a package that would market the item. I presented to the class that I wanted a box of some sort to carry the DPLA swag (stickers, pins and pens) to the different places I intended to be presenting about the DPLA. None of the students had heard of the DPLA, so I spent time talking about the DPLA mission and what the site offers. I said that I wanted to be able to walk into a training, DPLA caddy in hand, ready for action…

Yup, cats. Good ol’ cats. This week’s installment in our Summer of Archives series is all about our fuzzy feline friends, fount of cuteness for millennia. In case you missed it, last Friday, August 8, was International Cat Day, which you can belatedly celebrate (or relive!) by checking out the newest album.

BOSTON, MA, AND WASHINGTON, DC—The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) and the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) announced today that the Director of the Digital Library Federation (DLF), Rachel Frick, will join DPLA as its Business Development Director. DLF is a program of CLIR, and coordinates a large and diverse community of practitioners to help create innovative and widely useful digital resources such as DPLA. Prior to her tenure at CLIR/DLF, Frick held senior positions at the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the University of Richmond, among other roles. She is widely known in the library, archive, and museum world for her vision, organizational know-how, and commitment to open culture. She served as the co-chair of DPLA’s Content Committee during its initial planning phase.

We’re excited to share that DPLA is now participating in AmazonSmile, a program run by the web retailer to donate 0.5% of the price of eligible purchases to the charitable organizations of its customers’ choosing. Folks familiar with Amazon’s service enjoy the same wide selection of products and shopping features as on Amazon.com, but with the added bonus of supporting non-profits like DPLA and others for no extra effort or cost. So, sign up today and help support DPLA by shopping at smile.amazon.com for all of your Amazon purchases.

We’re extremely excited to welcome Gretchen Gueguen and Tom Johnson as the newest members of DPLA’s growing staff. Gretchen will supplement the work of DPLA’s content team as Data Services Coordinator, working alongside our Director and Assistant Director for Content to bring on new partners, conduct data mapping and ingest, perform quality assurance, and support several other critical projects. Tom will serve as DPLA’s Metadata and Platform Architect as part of DPLA’s technology team, and will focus on helping to further improve our metadata model and related infrastructure and expanding upon our work with linked open data.

Retired Director of Historical Services  for the Central Library of Rochester and Monroe County, New York and Community Rep Larry Naukam explains how DPLA offers new opportunities to family researchers as a growing number of small institutions making content available online.

The DPLA Board of Directors’ Governance Committee will hold a conference call on July 9, 2014 at 1:00 PM Eastern. The call is open to the public.

DPLA Board of Directors Chair John Palfrey was recently interviewed on Open Mind TV (PBS), a series devoted to engaging viewers, especially a generation of young Americans, through a thoughtful excursion into the world of ideas.

This is a reminder that our next open committee call will take place on Wednesday, July 2 at 2:00 PM Eastern.

Mark your calendars! We’re pleased to announce that DPLAfest 2015—our second celebration of all-things DPLA—will take place on April 17-18, 2015. The two-day public event, set to coincide with DPLA’s second birthday, will bring together hundreds of people from our large and growing community of librarians, archivists, and museum professionals, developers and technologists, publishers and authors, teachers and students, and members of the public for interactive workshops, hackathons, engaging discussions with community leaders and practitioners, fun events, and so much more.

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) announced today that it has received $300,000 from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation as part of its Knight News Challenge, an open contest seeking ideas that strengthen the Internet for free expression and innovation.

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) is pleased to announce that it has received an $81,000 grant from the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation to explore educational possibilities for its growing collection. The grant will allow DPLA to convene in-person meetings for educators from a wide variety of institutions, including K-12, community colleges, and research universities, this fall in Boston.

We wanted to let you know that later this week we will phase out the DPLA web forums in favor of our email lists. By focusing on these public lists, we hope to encourage more meaningful conversation among members of our community.

To promote the Digital Public Library of America to graduate students at the University of Delaware, Tracy and I organized a professional development workshop on “Digital Resources for Research and Teaching Using the DPLA as a Case Study” on April 15, 2014. Graduate students who are gaining first-hand experience teaching classes or leading sections are often looking for new ways to engage their students.

This is a short notice that the DPLA board will move from monthly open board calls to quarterly open calls effective immediately. It has been a busy and productive first year of growth and regular new developments to discuss, but as we settle into fulfilling our long-term mission we should be able to get our business done on quarterly calls.

This essay by Hilary K. Perez, Archivist, North Carolina Railroad Company, illustrates how resources from DPLA can support and enhance historical research.

We’re excited to announce that DPLA is officially teaming up with Imgur, the popular online photo-sharing platform, to launch an experiment in their gallery from now until August. We’re calling it the Summer of Archives. The idea is simple: throughout the summer we’re going to pull together some awesome collections of images and gifs using open materials found in DPLA.