February 23, 2016 – Open eBooks, a new initiative and e-reader app that will make thousands of popular, top-selling eBooks available to children in need for free, is launching today. First Lady Michelle Obama is releasing a video today raising awareness of the new opportunity for children. The initiative is designed to address the challenge of providing digital reading materials to children living in low-income households, and offers unprecedented access to quality digital content, including a catalog of eBooks valued at more than $250 million.

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.

We’re thrilled to announce today our fourth call for applications for the DPLA Community Reps program! The application for this fourth class of Reps will close on Friday, February 19, 2016.

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 Digital Public Library of America is partnering with Pop Up Archive to offer discounted services to the DPLA network. DPLA Hubs and their partners will be able to take advantage of this discounted rate to make it possible for anyone to search and pinpoint exact search terms and phrases within audiovisual collections.

We are happy to announce Michelle Bickert as DPLA’s eBook program manager and the newest member of DPLA’s growing staff.

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.

The Digital Public Library of America has been awarded $150,000 from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to research the potential integration of newspaper content into the DPLA platform.

The Digital Public Library of America is pleased to announce the appoint of Sarah Burnes to its Board of Directors. Burnes is an agent for The Gernert Company, a prominent literary agency located in New York City.

The Digital Public Library of America seeks an Engagement & Use Coordinator to help DPLA reach multiple audiences, and to make better and wider use of its large and growing open collection. This is a full-time position at DPLA’s headquarters in Boston, Massachusetts.

The Digital Public Library of America (http://dp.la/) seeks a full-time Developer to support the technical aspects of the organization’s operational needs. This position is directly involved in ensuring that DPLA’s ingestion process of harvesting, mapping, enriching, and indexing metadata we receive from our partners runs smoothly, reliably, and according to schedule. In addition, the position actively supports DevOps at DPLA, particularly in terms of developing and implementing tools and procedures to provision, administer, monitor, and maintain DPLA’s infrastructure and applications.

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.

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) is thrilled to announce that an anonymous donor has committed to provide substantial support towards DPLA’s mission in the form of a $250,000 grant to strengthen DPLA’s technical capabilities. This grant will allow DPLA to expand its technology team to handle additional content ingestion and to implement important new features based around its platform and website.

Wouldn’t libraries and archives like to be able to digitize their collections and make the texts and images available to the world online? Of course they would, but copyright inhibits this for most works created in the last 100 years.

The U.S. Copyright Office recently issued a report and a request for comments on its proposal for a new licensing system intended overcome copyright obstacles to mass digitization. While the goal is laudable, the Office’s proposal is troubling and vague in key respects.