Dear Friends of DPLA, In DPLA’s 2019 strategy, we articulated a three-pronged mission-driven approach that guides all of our work. One of these guidelines is our optimism about and belief in the transformational potential of technology for unleashing knowledge and enabling creativity. And, furthermore, we believe that libraries and cultural heritage institutions can and must […]

Several times a year, DPLA Chief Technology Officer Michael Della Bitta shares updates on our tech team’s projects, processes, and works-in-progress. This is his first update of 2022.

Just a year ago, the world of work underwent a seismic shift as a result of the COVID pandemic. DPLA, in some ways, was more ready for this kind of change than other teams — we were already distributed across the country, so we had already built the remote-working muscles needed to get things done during quarantine. And 99% of our operations were virtual as well, leaving essentially the main tangible change to be figuring out how to collect the mail.

Over the last couple of weeks, the DPLA technology team and I have spent some time evaluating the progress we made in the last year, and looking ahead to how we can make the biggest impact in 2021. I wanted to take a minute to update you on steps we are taking to improve access and discovery of artifacts in the DPLA aggregation.

The DPLA Tech Team has been hard at work this summer on a number of new projects, and we are excited to share some things we have “shipping” out this month.

Director of Technology Michael Della Bitta provides an update on the work of the DPLA Tech Team over the past year and provides a preview of priorities ahead over the coming year.