We are pleased to announce the recipients of the 2016 DPLA + DLF Cross-Pollinator Travel Grants, which will allow cross-pollinators—active DLF community contributors who can provide unique perspectives and share the vision of DPLA from their perspective—to attend DPLAfest 2016.

The Digital Library Federation (DLF) and Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) are excited to partner once again in offering DPLA + DLF Cross-Pollinator Travel Grants to three DLF community members to attend DPLAfest 2016 (April 14-15 in Washington, DC).

The agenda for DPLAfest 2016 is now available! Taking place in the heart of Washington, DC, DPLAfest 2016 (April 14-15) will bring together hundreds from DPLA’s large and growing community for interactive workshops, hackathons and other collaborative activities, engaging discussions with community leaders and practitioners, fun events, and more.

We love connecting with new audiences and were thrilled to have the opportunity to touch base with genealogists and family researchers at RootsTech 2016 to chat about their needs, interests, and questions about what DPLA has to offer.

The American Library Association’s (ALA) midwinter conference starts in a few weeks, so we’ve compiled a short schedule of talks, panels, and presentations that feature members of our staff, Board, and Hubs. Sessions involving DPLA staff are marked [S], while sessions involving Board or Hub members are marked with [A], for ‘affiliate’.

We’re pleased to announce that registration for DPLAfest 2016 — taking place on April 14-15 in Washington, DC — has officially opened. We invite all those interested from the general public, the educational community, public and research libraries, cultural organizations, state and local government, the creative community, publishers, and private industry to join us for conversation and community building as we celebrate our third year of bringing together our nation’s collections. Area institutions serving as co-hosts include the National Archives and Records Administration, the Library of Congress, and the Smithsonian Institution.

We’re pleased to invite our extended community to attend a free DPLA workshop webinar — An Introduction to DPLA’s Application Programming Interface — taking place on February, 11, 2016 at 3:30PM. This webinar, led by DPLA Technology Specialist Mark Breedlove, will introduce the fundamentals of distributed web application architecture to an uninitiated audience, with a special focus on the DPLA’s Application Programming Interface, or API.

There was strong competition in GIF IT UP this year. Lots of fantastic animated gifs were created by talented people from around the world. Our esteemed judges, Sarah Schaaf from Imgur, Rebecca Onion from Slate Vault, and Alessandro Scali and Marco Calabrese from Okkult Motion Pictures, and Toby Morris from the Wireless have pored over the entries, and we’re really pleased to announce our winners!

The next DPLA Board of Directors call is scheduled for Tuesday, December 15 at 3:00 PM Eastern. Agenda and dial-in information is included below. This call is open to the public, except where noted.

We are pleased to announce that we are now seeking session proposals for DPLAfest 2016. An annual series of workshops, presentations, and discussions, DPLAfest brings together librarians, archivists, and museum professionals, developers and technologists, publishers and authors, educators, and many others to celebrate DPLA and its community of creative professionals. The deadline to submit a session proposal is Friday, January 22, 2016.

The extended DPLA community is warmly invited to a one day event in Ghent, Belgium, hosted by the International Image Interoperability Framework community (http://iiif.io/) and Ghent University Library (http://lib.ugent.be/), describing the power and potential of interoperable image delivery over the Web.

Calling all GIF-makers, creatives, history nuts, and animators! GIF IT UP, a challenge coordinated by DigitalNZ and the Digital Public Library of America to find the best GIFs created from copyright-free heritage material, launches today and will run until November 21.

We’re pleased to share some news regarding the DPLA open committee calls, a series of conference calls that we’ve hosted for the past two years, and that helped us transition from DPLA’s planning phase into its implementation and existence as a nonprofit. Based on helpful feedback from our board, committees, and community, we have come to understand that these calls, which have been rather broad-based (on “Content,” “Tech,” etc.), have in many ways been superseded by our more focused open discussions, e.g., around our work on Hydra, and of course our critical ongoing work with our hubs and national network.

Mark your calendars! We’re thrilled to announce that DPLAfest 2016—the third annual celebration of DPLA and its broad community—will take place on April 14-15, 2016 in Washington, DC. The hosts for DPLAfest 2016 include some of our nation’s most esteemed and important cultural institutions: The National Archives and Records Administration, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Library of Congress.

The next DPLA Board of Directors call is scheduled for Wednesday, September 16 at 3:00 PM Eastern. Agenda and dial-in information is included below. This call is open to the public, except where noted.

Join us for a half-day workshop learning about DPLA data and how you can use it to inform your practice and make extreme sharing part of your workflow!

The DPLA will lead an open call on Wednesday, July 15 at 2:00 PM Eastern to discuss and field questions about the DPLA Open Ebooks Initiative.

The DPLA Board of Directors Governance Committee will hold a brief open call on Wednesday, July 8 at 1:00 PM Eastern. Agenda and dial-in information can be found below. This call is open to the public.​

The DPLA Board of Directors will hold an open call on Monday, June 15 at 3:00 PM Eastern. Agenda and dial-in information can be found below. This call is open to the public.​

It’s been just about a month now since the conclusion of the second annual DPLAfest in Indianapolis, where about 300 people gathered to discuss the current and future state of digital collections and digital publishing. Those in attendance included librarians, archivists, publishers, authors, developers, and other interested members of the community. My own participation at the conference was generously made possible by a DPLA + DLF Cross-Pollinator Travel Grant, which allowed me share with and learn from DPLA community during the two-day event.