We wish to thank Robert Darnton and Luis Herrera for their enthusiastic support and steadfast guidance as members of DPLA’s Board of Directors, and give a warm welcome to new members Brian Bannon and Chris Bourg, who will begin their first term this summer.

Our collections and our partner network are growing! The collections of our newest hub, Digital Maryland, are now searchable in the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) alongside millions of resources from partners across the country. Through the efforts of Digital Maryland and USMAI, over 83,000 new resources from public libraries, museums, historical societies, and college libraries are now available via DPLA.

As part of DPLA’s ongoing transition to a new executive director, the Board of Directors has named Michele Kimpton the interim executive director until a new executive director is hired.

We are pleased to announce the publication of our newest exhibition, American Empire, curated by DPLA intern and Brown University Public Humanities MA candidate Andrea Ledesma. American Empire offers a dynamic exploration of the Age of American Imperialism between the Spanish-American War and the mid-twentieth century. Through the examination of the culture, administration, and development of American colonialism in Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Hawaii, the exhibition explores the rise and fall of the American empire and its legacies.

Thanks to Dan’s leadership, DPLA’s team is solid and prepared to ensure a successful transition given Dan’s departure on June 1. In light of DPLA’s upcoming change in leadership, the DPLA Board of Directors is embracing the challenge of taking stock as to our progress to date, along with thinking about our hopes and dreams and the selection process for a new Executive Director is now underway.

The Digital Public Library of America seeks a full-time Developer to support ongoing work on the DPLA public-facing Web applications. We are seeking a curious and enthusiastic individual who recognizes both their technical strengths and areas for growth, who can help us work effectively to further DPLA’s mission to bring together the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and make them freely available to all.

DPLAfest 2017, the fourth annual event bringing together members of the broad DPLA community, officially kicked off Thursday morning at Chicago Public Library’s Harold Washington Library Center. Over the next two days, over 350 participants, representing diverse fields including libraries, archives, museums, technology, education, and more, will come together to learn, converse, and collaborate in a broad range of sessions, workshops, and working sessions.

In today’s society, where fake news abounds, funding for arts and humanities programs is at risk, the wealth gap is expanding, and our nation continues to wrestle with questions of belonging and inclusion for many people, we at DPLA believe it is more important than ever to be clear about who we are and what we value as an organization. As such, we are proud to unveil DPLA’s new Values Statement.

We are pleased to announce that the application for the fifth class of the DPLA Community Reps program is now open! Learn more below, tell a friend or colleague, and complete the application form to apply by April 24, 2017.

There shouldn’t have to be special days to reflect upon the importance of women in our society, but today’s “A Day Without a Woman” presents a good opportunity to highlight just how critical women have been and are to our organization, our community, and the broader public we serve together.

The Digital Public Library of America is looking for excellent instructors in higher education to join its Education Advisory Committee for 2017-2018. A new grant from the Teagle Foundation funds the creation of a professional development curriculum and new set development for our Primary Source Sets project. We are currently recruiting a small group of enthusiastic educators in higher education to collaborate with our current team of K-12 and higher ed instructors on this project.

The Digital Public Library of America is pleased to announce that Michele Kimpton will be joining its staff as Director of Business Development and Senior Strategist beginning March 1, 2017.

The DPLAfest 2017 program of sessions, workshops, lightning talks, and more is now available! Look for opportunities to engage with topics such as social justice and digital collections; public engagement; library technology and interoperability; metadata best practices; ebooks; and using digital collections in education and curation projects.

That’s right, folks — #ColorOurCollections is back for kids and grown-ups alike! On your next lunch break, free evening, or Saturday afternoon, try your hand at coloring cultural heritage collections from institutions across the country.

We are pleased to announce that the collections of the Michigan Service Hub are officially ‘live’ in DPLA and ready to explore! Accepted to the DPLA network in 2015, the Michigan Service Hub represents a collaborative effort between the Library of Michigan, University of Michigan, Wayne State University, Michigan State University, Western Michigan University and the Midwest Collaborative for Library Services. As of this week, the Michigan Hub partners have made 42,000 new items discoverable in DPLA and plan to add more in the future.

2016 was another exciting and busy year at the Digital Public Library of America, with extensive growth of our national network, the launch of an important projects to standardize rights statements, provide greater access to ebooks, curate our materials for education, and improve the technical systems our community relies upon.

The Digital Public Library of America is pleased to welcome Arielle Perry as our new Program Assistant.

The Digital Public Library of America is thrilled to announce that the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has awarded DPLA $1.5 million to greatly expand its efforts to provide broad access to widely read ebooks. The grant will support improved channels for public libraries to bolster their ebook collections, and for millions of readers nationwide to access those works easily.

The collections of the Illinois Digital Heritage Hub are officially live in DPLA and ready to explore. Our newest hub from Illinois represents a collaboration between the Illinois State Library, the Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Illinois (CARLI), Chicago Public Library, and, previously a Content Hub partner, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The Digital Public Library of America is delighted to announce that it has received a generous $150,000 grant from the Teagle Foundation to extend its work around curated sets of primary source materials for the classroom.