With expanded vaccine access, many of us have begun to conceive of what our post-Covid worlds might look like. These visions are necessarily colored by all that we have learned during the last year—from the benefits of flexible working arrangements to the urgent need to finally dismantle systemic racism in our work.

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.

Early last year, DPLA embarked on a new project, supported by Sloan Foundation, to make images from DPLA’s aggregation of more than 40 million cultural heritage artifacts accessible to vast new audiences via Wikimedia. January 2021 marked the one-year anniversary of this project, and we wanted to share with you some of the exciting outcomes thus far:

This is the fourth and final post in a series from DPLA’s Audrey Altman about the curatorial and technological challenges involved in the development of the Black Women’s Suffrage Digital Collection. As a data engineer, Audrey worked alongside the curators Shaneé Yvette Murrain and Kathleen Williams to address underlying biases in the collection and surface representative stories about Black women’s contributions to voting rights movements.

This is the third in a series of posts from DPLA’s Audrey Altman about the curatorial and technological challenges involved in the development of the Black Women’s Suffrage Digital Collection.

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) is pleased to announce that we are now offering an ebook creation service to libraries. This new service, provided in partnership with Digital Divide Data (DDD), gives libraries the ability to easily and affordably digitize and reformat texts to create ebooks in EPUB format from print materials that are in the public domain or for which the library owns the copyright.

This is the second in a series of posts from DPLA’s Audrey Altman about the curatorial and technological challenges involved in the development of the Black Women’s Suffrage Digital Collection.

DPLA is pleased to invite members of our Hub Network to these upcoming “Brown Bag” lunch events. These 45-minute virtual get-togethers are organized around topics of interest or importance to our network and meat to be a chance to reconnect with colleagues and share information in a friendly, casual setting.

This is the first in a series of posts from DPLA’s Audrey Altman about the curatorial and technological challenges involved in the development of the Black Women’s Suffrage Digital Collection.

Digital Public Library of America is pleased to announce that we are beginning production on the publication of a new ebook, tentatively titled By the Quill of Her Pen: Black Suffragists in Their Own Words. This new DPLA-published ebook will be a collection of 20-30 letters, diary entries, and accompanying photographs and biographical information that […]

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.

I am pleased to share that you now can find more than half a million ebooks and audiobooks from over 1,000 publishers on the newly redesigned DPLA Exchange, the only library-owned ebook and audiobook marketplace.

On January 15th, at our Open Board + Community meeting, we hosted a community conversation, Reckoning with Our Pasts + Building Our Futures, about working to live up to our common commitments to equity and inclusion in 2021 and beyond.

A Wikimedia project update, upcoming events, hub network news, and more

The Digital Public Library of America brings together resources and collections from institutions across the country, all on one easily accessible platform. Because of this, DPLA has the ability to inform people about little-known collections and resources as well help coordinate and model best practices in the library/archives field with regard to our DEI values, descriptive standards, and ethical issues pertaining to rights and intellectual property.

Under the leadership of director Michael Blackwell, St. Mary’s County Library in Maryland has been an active participant in DPLA’s ebook work. We talked with Michael about his library’s experience with SimplyE, and how it’s helped to maximize access for patrons in St. Mary’s County.

Join us on Friday, January 15, 2021, at 2 pm ET for our next Community + Open Board meeting. We’ll be hosting Reckoning with Our Pasts and Building Our Futures, a community conversation about the work to be done to live up to our common commitments to equity and inclusion in 2021 and beyond, as […]

Last week DPLA hosted our first (virtual) holiday reception. It was a risk– none of us had ever been to a virtual holiday reception before, and we weren’t sure exactly what we would do, or even if anyone would come. But with the encouragement of some of our friends (thanks, Keila!), we took that risk, and ended up with a gathering of more than 40 public librarians, college and middle school educators, technologists and funders. We were joined by DPLA founders, longtime collaborators, and people whom we only met this year. I was reminded of the value of taking risks; the collective effort that is DPLA is itself a risk. And I was struck, as I have been so many times this year, by the breadth, dedication, and resilience of the extended DPLA community. With that in mind, I wanted to reflect on some of our achievements this year.

DPLA’s Open Bookshelf is a collection of more than 8,000 free ebooks that includes a wide range of titles from classics to children’s books to textbooks, and everything in between. Anyone can get instant access—no registration required— at freebooks.dp.la or by using the free SimplyE app and choosing “Digital Public Library of America” as your […]

As we look back on the ups and downs of our own year at DPLA, we wanted to share with you some information about how the 1.5 million people who visited dp.la this year used our resources: