Following a successful DPLAfest 2016 in Washington, DC, we’re looking for next year’s location for another great interactive, productive, and exciting fest. DPLAfest is an annual event that brings together hundreds of people from the cultural, education, and technology communities to celebrate the Digital Public Library of America, our many partners across the country, and our large and growing community of practitioners and members of the public who contribute to, and benefit from, DPLA.

With DPLAfest 2016 larger than ever, we reached out to a few attendees ahead of the event to help us capture the (many) diverse experiences of fest participants. These ‘special correspondents’ have graciously volunteered to share their personal perspectives on the fest. In this first of two guest posts by our special correspondents, Sara Stephenson, Kerry Dunne, and Emily Pfotenhauer reflect on their fest experiences from the perspectives of their fields and interests: education, ebooks, and the growing DPLA hub network.

Whether you missed the fest, participated from afar, or are just hoping to revisit some of the great ideas shared during the conference, look no further! This post is your guide to the news, notes, media, and other materials associated with the DPLAfest 2016.

Held at the Colorado Convention Center, the Public Library Association’s 2016 Conference empowered attendees with the tools to return to their library and “Make It Extraordinary.” As the Digital Public Library of America, DPLA is utilizing its national network of libraries and cultural heritage institutions to explore how it can help improve the state of library ebooks.

At the start of DPLAfest 2016 in Washington, DC, the Digital Public Library of America announced significant growth and important new directions. This year’s DPLAfest, the third of its kind, is bringing together more than 450 people from DPLA’s expanding community to discuss a range of topics related to DPLA, its network of partners, digital libraries, education, and much more. DPLAfest 2016 is co-hosted by the Library of Congress, the National Archives and Records Administration, and the Smithsonian Institution.

We are very excited about the fantastic line-up of presentations, workshops, hackathons & fun events in store. DPLAfest represents a one-of-a-kind opportunity to bring together the folks who are producing digital cultural heritage, using these collections for innovative research and education, and thinking big about what how developments in technology, policy, and open access will shape the future of our work.

Four DPLA staff members recently attended LDCX at Stanford University. The annual conference is a chance for those in the library, archive, and museum (LAM) communities who work with technology to collaborate on solutions to common problems.

We are pleased to announce the recipients of the 2016 DPLA + DLF Cross-Pollinator Travel Grants, which will allow cross-pollinators—active DLF community contributors who can provide unique perspectives and share the vision of DPLA from their perspective—to attend DPLAfest 2016.

The Digital Library Federation (DLF) and Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) are excited to partner once again in offering DPLA + DLF Cross-Pollinator Travel Grants to three DLF community members to attend DPLAfest 2016 (April 14-15 in Washington, DC).

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.

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 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.

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.

We’re pleased to share some news regarding the DPLA open committee calls, a series of conference calls that we’ve hosted for the past two years, and that helped us transition from DPLA’s planning phase into its implementation and existence as a nonprofit. Based on helpful feedback from our board, committees, and community, we have come to understand that these calls, which have been rather broad-based (on “Content,” “Tech,” etc.), have in many ways been superseded by our more focused open discussions, e.g., around our work on Hydra, and of course our critical ongoing work with our hubs and national network.