A recent blogpost by Dan Brinkley, a leader in the use of linked open data, has been causing quite the stir on the DPLA listserv over the past week.

In this interview, Vassilis Tzouvaras discusses Metadata Interoperability Services (MINT), a web-based platform that enables the aggregation of rich and diverse cultural heritage content and metadata.

Robert Darnton, historian and Director of the Harvard Library, speaks about the future of books and libraries with Harvard Library Innovation Lab’s David Weinberger.

John Butler talks about his team’s Beta Sprint project, Government Publications: Enhanced Access and Discovery through Open Linked Data and Crowdsourcing

“Big-scale collaborations and digital-era collection strategies took center stage at the Association of Research Libraries’ membership meeting, held here last week.”

Ben Schmidt and Martin Camacho from the Cultural Observatory at Harvard University sat down with me earlier this week to speak about their Beta Sprint project, Bookworm.

They are miles apart in their thinking about digital books, but the Association of American Publishers’ (AAP) president, Tom Allen, and Harvard University library director Robert Darnton came face to face to discuss the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) on October 11

Jeffrey Schnapp, faculty director of the metaLAB (at) Harvard, discusses extraMUROS, one of nine Beta Sprint projects selected for presentation at the October 21 plenary meeting.

The DPLA will make available tools and services to other libraries, such as open source code and a store of metadata, but content was a big part of what it hopes to offer.

The project prototype leverages the Institute of Museum and Library Services’ Digital Collections and Content (IMLS DCC) resource and DLF Aquifer content as a core collection for the DPLA.

A guest post from Research Assistant Kenny Whitebloom. “From my perspective as a library science student, it seems to me that the DPLA has an opportunity to become a catalyst for a large-scale turn in how we as a society choose to organize and contextualize our collective knowledge online…”

“We feel that extraMUROS and Zeega can be particularly powerful in helping the DPLA forge alliances between cultural heritage institutions of all types and scales, allowing citizen scholars, teachers, local historical societies, public libraries, schools, colleges, museums and libraries to form an interconnected web of shared knowledge.”

“The minds behind the Digital Public Library of America are thinking very big. Can they succeed where others have failed?”

From Micah Vandegrift: “I’ve been following the development of the DPLA for about a year now, and the conversations surrounding it have been almost as exciting as the idea itself. So what exactly is the idea?”

“The DPLA will make our cultural heritage available not to consume, but to parse, sort, analyze, visualize, remix, and redisplay.”

On October 21, 2011, the DPLA will hold a plenary session at the National Archives in Washington, D.C that will bring together the project’s major players.

From David Weinberger: “Our small team at Harvard , with generous internal support, built ShelfLife and LibraryCloud on top of the integrated catalogs of five libraries, public and university, with a combined count of almost 15 million items, plus circulation data.”

Amazon and OverDrive, the most prominent distributor of ebooks to libraries in the United States, will be teaming up to provide access to Amazon’s Kindle book collection for some 11,000 public and school libraries.

David Rothman, writer and founder of Teleread and LibraryCity, gives his take on Harvard Innovation Lab’s ShelfLife beta sprint submission.

The Fourth Annual International Conference hosted by ILIAC (International Library Information and Analytic Center), the Harriman Institute and Columbia University Libraries, and the U*N*A*B*A*S*H*E*D Librarian will take place at Columbia University on October 11, 2011.