Washington, DC & BOSTON — The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) announced today a $999,485 grant to the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) for a major expansion of its infrastructure.

More awesome news from DPLA! Hot on the heels of announcements about newly added materials from the Medical Heritage Library and the Government Printing Office, we’re excited to share that some 92,000 items from the J. Paul Getty Trust are now also available.

We were pleased to share yesterday that nearly 60,000 items from the Medical Heritage Library have made their way into DPLA, and we’re now doubly pleased to share that nearly 150,000 items from the Government Printing Office’s (GPO) Catalog of U.S. Government Publications (CGP) are now also available via DPLA.

The Medical Heritage Library (MHL) is pleased to announce that MHL content can now be discovered through the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). The MHL, a specialized research collection stored in the Internet Archive, currently includes nearly 60,000 digital rare books, serials, audio and video recordings, and ephemera in the history of medicine, public health, biomedical sciences, and popular medicine from the medical special collections of 22 academic, special, and public libraries.

BOSTON, MA, AND WASHINGTON, DC—The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) and the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) announced today that the Director of the Digital Library Federation (DLF), Rachel Frick, will join DPLA as its Business Development Director. DLF is a program of CLIR, and coordinates a large and diverse community of practitioners to help create innovative and widely useful digital resources such as DPLA. Prior to her tenure at CLIR/DLF, Frick held senior positions at the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the University of Richmond, among other roles. She is widely known in the library, archive, and museum world for her vision, organizational know-how, and commitment to open culture. She served as the co-chair of DPLA’s Content Committee during its initial planning phase.

We’re excited to share that DPLA is now participating in AmazonSmile, a program run by the web retailer to donate 0.5% of the price of eligible purchases to the charitable organizations of its customers’ choosing. Folks familiar with Amazon’s service enjoy the same wide selection of products and shopping features as on Amazon.com, but with the added bonus of supporting non-profits like DPLA and others for no extra effort or cost. So, sign up today and help support DPLA by shopping at smile.amazon.com for all of your Amazon purchases.

We’re extremely excited to welcome Gretchen Gueguen and Tom Johnson as the newest members of DPLA’s growing staff. Gretchen will supplement the work of DPLA’s content team as Data Services Coordinator, working alongside our Director and Assistant Director for Content to bring on new partners, conduct data mapping and ingest, perform quality assurance, and support several other critical projects. Tom will serve as DPLA’s Metadata and Platform Architect as part of DPLA’s technology team, and will focus on helping to further improve our metadata model and related infrastructure and expanding upon our work with linked open data.

DPLA Board of Directors Chair John Palfrey was recently interviewed on Open Mind TV (PBS), a series devoted to engaging viewers, especially a generation of young Americans, through a thoughtful excursion into the world of ideas.

Mark your calendars! We’re pleased to announce that DPLAfest 2015—our second celebration of all-things DPLA—will take place on April 17-18, 2015. The two-day public event, set to coincide with DPLA’s second birthday, will bring together hundreds of people from our large and growing community of librarians, archivists, and museum professionals, developers and technologists, publishers and authors, teachers and students, and members of the public for interactive workshops, hackathons, engaging discussions with community leaders and practitioners, fun events, and so much more.

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) announced today that it has received $300,000 from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation as part of its Knight News Challenge, an open contest seeking ideas that strengthen the Internet for free expression and innovation.

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) is pleased to announce that it has received an $81,000 grant from the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation to explore educational possibilities for its growing collection. The grant will allow DPLA to convene in-person meetings for educators from a wide variety of institutions, including K-12, community colleges, and research universities, this fall in Boston.

We wanted to let you know that later this week we will phase out the DPLA web forums in favor of our email lists. By focusing on these public lists, we hope to encourage more meaningful conversation among members of our community.

This is a short notice that the DPLA board will move from monthly open board calls to quarterly open calls effective immediately. It has been a busy and productive first year of growth and regular new developments to discuss, but as we settle into fulfilling our long-term mission we should be able to get our business done on quarterly calls.

DPLA research assistant Hillary Brady describes her process for building DPLA’s new exhibition, “The Golden Age of Radio in the US.”

We’re extremely excited to announce our second class of DPLA Community Reps–volunteers who engage their local communities by leading DPLA outreach activities. We were blown away by the response to our second call for applicants, and we’re thrilled to now add nearly 100 new Community Reps to our already-excellent first class, bringing the total roster to 200 strong!

The Digital Public Library of America is pleased to announce that Audrey Altman will be joining its growing staff as Technical Specialist, beginning June 1, 2014 in DPLA’s Boston office.

On April 17 and 18, we celebrated our 1st birthday with a host of exciting announcements. Included below are reflections from members of the press and public on DPLA and its progress 1-year in.

This week marks the one-year anniversary of the launch of the Digital Public Library of America (http://dp.la), a groundbreaking all-digital library that brings together millions of items from America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world. In celebration, DPLA is proud to announce the addition of five major new partners and other significant milestones that attest to the tremendous momentum the project has as it enters its second year.

It’s hard to believe that a year has already gone by since our launch last April. It’s been a whirlwind here in the Boston headquarters of DPLA, and across DPLA’s ever-expanding national network of libraries, archives, museums, and cultural heritage sites. The surging numbers in our collection—6.7 million items from over 1300 contributing institutions, up from 2.4 million and 500 a year ago—attest to the tremendous momentum we’ve achieved.

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) seeks a Business Development Director to help our organization achieve sustainability through the assessment of potential revenue models and the execution of one or more of those models. Applications are due by May 5, 2014.