The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) announced today a $250,000 grant to support the development of the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) and its Digital Hubs Pilot Program.

The DPLA Steering Committee is pleased to announce the appointment of five members to the inaugural DPLA Board of Directors.

The Berkman Center Cyberlaw Clinic and the DPLA Research Team publishes research on possible governance models for the Governance Workstream in advance of its August 2012 workshop.

Using data from publicly accessible DPLA APIs for over 12 million Harvard library records, metaLAB designer Travis Bost created an animation that charts the evolution of early modern works at Harvard by their place of publication from 1400-1500.

This week’s digest covers the Petersburg digitization project, book design for e-books, open access publishing of British research, the future of the Bronx’s Huntington Library, and the suspension of crowdfunding for Unglue.it.

In this guest post, Jessica Keyes, Assistant Web Manager at the Enoch Pratt Free Library, discusses her experience at the second Audience and Participation workshop, held in Baltimore, MD on July 27, 2012.

The Berkman Center for Internet & Society has released “E-Books in Libraries: A Briefing Document Developed in Preparation for a Workshop on E-Lending in Libraries,” authored by David O’Brien, Urs Gasser, and John Palfrey. The paper was created to prepare for the Berkman Center’s “E-Books in Libraries” workshop, which was held on February 24, 2012. Thanks to a collaborative effort from industry stakeholders, practitioners, and other authorities the briefing examines the shifting paradigm in the digital publishing industry and the consequent issues of access and copyright.

This week’s digest features the economics of e-book lending, the digitization of Shakespeare’s First Folio, the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s latest grant to build an online archive, and a project to preserve and digitize endangered languages.

“The grant will help form a new nonprofit organization and create the technical platform to share digital content across the nation’s many public libraries and archives. Digitizing books and building a system for libraries to contribute will take years, though, and millions more dollars from private partners, said endowment chairman Jim Leach.”

“‘The endowment hopes to increase the access of all citizens to humanity’s great stories, triumphs, and ideas,’ said Jim Leach, the endowment’s chairman, ‘and foster a love of lifelong learning and discovery.’”

“The NEH grant will help support a pilot program of DPLA ‘service hubs’ at the state or regional level. The hubs will function as a kind of information ‘on ramp’ to digital content coordinated and made findable by the DPLA, according to Maura Marx, director of the DPLA Secretariat, which coordinates DPLA planning. Eight working groups have been focused on specific workstreams: content and scope, legal issues, and so on.”

“The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) awarded $1 million to fund the creation of the infrastructure for the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) last week, and the organization will now turn its focus toward developing a way to search across the many disparate collections involved with the project.”

This week’s digest covers the Library of America’s expanding e-book program, proposals to revolutionize current publishing models, new additions to the Internet Archive live music collection, and the continuing map digitization project at the New York Public Library.

Designed to facilitate discussion and present possible functions for the DPLA platform, a variety of use cases will be featured and examined at the second Audience & Participation workshop on July 27, 2012.

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) today announced a $1 million award that will support the creation of the DPLA’s content infrastructure.

“The DPLA is the most ambitious entrant on the digital library scene precisely because it claims to recognize this need for scale, and to be marshaling its resources and preparing its infrastructure accordingly. With hundreds of librarians, technologists, and academics attending its meetings (and over a thousand people on its email listserv), the DPLA has performed the singular feat of convening into one room the best minds in digital and library sciences.”

The Content and Scope Workstream will host its second workshop at the Museum of Photographic Art in San Diego, CA on August 5-6, 2012.

The DPLA Steering Committee has approved members of a five-person Nominating Committee that will recommend members for the inaugural DPLA Board.

This week’s digest features medical artifacts form the National Library of Medicine, an analysis of last year’s ebook sales, and a new project from the British Library and Qatar Foundation.

John Palfrey discusses his book, “Intellectual Property Strategy,” the importance of intellectual property as a core asset class, and his work with the DPLA.