Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) is pleased to announce the launch of its new Black Women’s Suffrage Digital Collection. The collection makes freely accessible nearly 200,000 artifacts, including images, videos, letters, diaries, speeches, maps, diaries, and oral histories, from DPLA’s more than 4,000 partner institutions that document the contributions and experiences of Black women during the women’s suffrage movement as well as Black women’s activism from the 1850s to the 1960s.

We are pleased to invite you to Race, Power, and Curation, a virtual event celebrating the launch of our Black Women’s Suffrage Digital Collection, on Tuesday, September 8, 2020, from 1-2:30 pm ET.

Last week’s event—Race, Gender, Politics, and History: Reconstructing Visibility of Black Women’s Activism—was the best-attended webinar in DPLA’s history. We’d like to thank everyone who joined us for five informative and thought-provoking presentations by people and organizations at the forefront of the work to lift up and celebrate Black women’s contributions to not only the suffrage movement but the history of protest and activism in the United States.

Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) today announced a set of partnerships with the Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library; Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture in Charleston, South Carolina; Tuskegee University; the Amistad Research Center at Tulane University; and Southern California Library to collaborate on the creation of a national digital collection that highlights the roles and experiences of Black women in the women’s suffrage movement, as well as Black women’s history of activism, as part of the centennial celebration of the passage of the 19th Amendment.

Join the DPLA Rights Statements Working Group for our Standardized Rights Statements 101 webinar on Wednesday, July 22nd from 2-3 pm ET.

All of us at DPLA send a big thank you to everyone who attended our Community + Open Board Meeting on Friday, and a special thanks to Tracie Hall, John Palfrey, and Felton Thomas for an inspiring and thought-provoking conversation about equity, access, and the future of reading. In case you missed it, a recording is now available.

The DPLA community is invited to join us for a new webinar, Collaborating for Literacy: Exploring Licensing Models that Work for Libraries, Creators, and Readers, on Thursday, July 9th from 1:30 to 2:30 pm ET.

DPLA’s Network Council is the representative body for DPLA’s members. As cultural heritage workers and digital library practitioners, we recognize the deficits in the ways our profession has documented Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, the LGBTQ community, and others whose voices have been drowned out by those with more power or organizational standing.

At DPLA our mission is to ensure equitable access to knowledge for all. Central to that mission is our commitment to ensuring that everyone’s stories are told.

This month, we at DPLA were thrilled to welcome 10 new members to our Curation Corps of volunteer librarians/curators: Dorothy Berry, Digital Collections Program Manager, Houghton Library, Harvard University Cynthia Bower, Former Federal/Government Docs Librarian, University of Arizona Carady DeSimone, Sunshine State Digital Network Metadata Group Michele Huie, Systems and Cataloging Librarian, Santa Clara County […]

All of us at Digital Public Library of America have been outraged and saddened by the tragic killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Tony McDade, and David McAtee. As an organization, we believe that it is our responsibility to reject racism and reiterate our commitment not only to free access to knowledge, but […]

It’s hard to believe it’s been more than two months since much of the country moved to remote work, and we first shared some tips that have helped make our team successful while being spread out across the country.

Earlier this month, the DPLA ebooks team met virtually with state librarians from across the country as part of the annual spring COSLA members’ meeting.

We’ve been hearing from public libraries and others around the country who are recommending DPLA to their patrons and communities for free access to cultural heritage artifacts, ebooks, and educational and genealogical resources.

At the beginning of April, DPLA established a 90-day plan that has and will continue to guide our work during this unprecedented time. With May already upon us, we wanted to take a moment to update you on our progress.

The entire DPLA team would like to extend our gratitude to the 100+ members of our community who joined us on Tuesday for our open board meeting. We send special thanks to Katie McCormick of Florida State University and the Sunshine State Digital Network; Mark Smith, Director and Librarian at the Texas State Library and […]

As many of you know, in December 2019, DPLA announced a new project, supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, to make it easier to incorporate artifacts from DPLA’s partner institutions into Wikimedia Commons. We believe this is an exciting opportunity for our partners to boost visibility and usage via inclusion in Wikipedia articles. We […]

DPLA’s core mission is to make knowledge freely accessible to all, and that mission has never been more important than during the current crisis. As we announced last week in our 90-day plan, we are redoubling our efforts in service of that mission, and that includes working to get more books into the hands of more libraries and more library patrons.

We hope you’ll join us next Tuesday, April 14th, at 1:30 pm ET for our open board call.

Over the last few weeks, the DPLA team has been, like all of you, striving to adapt to our new reality while also checking in on family, friends and colleagues. We’ve been grateful to hear from many of you not only about the new challenges you’re facing, but about how our community is coming together in new ways to meet this moment and forge a way forward.