Mark your calendars! We’re thrilled to announce that DPLAfest 2016—the third annual celebration of DPLA and its broad community—will take place on April 14-15, 2016 in Washington, DC. The hosts for DPLAfest 2016 include some of our nation’s most esteemed and important cultural institutions: The National Archives and Records Administration, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Library of Congress.

The next DPLA Board of Directors call is scheduled for Wednesday, September 16 at 3:00 PM Eastern. Agenda and dial-in information is included below. This call is open to the public, except where noted.

Join us for a half-day workshop learning about DPLA data and how you can use it to inform your practice and make extreme sharing part of your workflow!

The DPLA will lead an open call on Wednesday, July 15 at 2:00 PM Eastern to discuss and field questions about the DPLA Open Ebooks Initiative.

The DPLA Board of Directors Governance Committee will hold a brief open call on Wednesday, July 8 at 1:00 PM Eastern. Agenda and dial-in information can be found below. This call is open to the public.​

The American Library Association’s (ALA) annual conference is right around the corner, so we here at the DPLA have pulled together a nifty little schedule of talks, panels, and presentations that feature members of our staff, Board, Committees, and Hubs. Sessions involving DPLA staff are marked [S], while sessions involving Board, Committee, or Hub members are marked with [A], for ‘affiliate’.

The DPLA Board of Directors will hold an open call on Monday, June 15 at 3:00 PM Eastern. Agenda and dial-in information can be found below. This call is open to the public.​

It’s been just about a month now since the conclusion of the second annual DPLAfest in Indianapolis, where about 300 people gathered to discuss the current and future state of digital collections and digital publishing. Those in attendance included librarians, archivists, publishers, authors, developers, and other interested members of the community. My own participation at the conference was generously made possible by a DPLA + DLF Cross-Pollinator Travel Grant, which allowed me share with and learn from DPLA community during the two-day event.

This guest post was written by Benjamin Armintor, Programmer/Analyst at Columbia University Libraries and a 2015 DPLA + DLF Cross-Pollinator Travel Grant awardee.

Hot on the heels of the massively successful second DPLAfest, we’re looking for the next great site to host next year’s interactive, productive, and exciting event. DPLAfest is an annual event that brings together hundreds of people 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.

This guest post was written by Laura Wrubel, a 2015 DPLA + DLF Cross-Pollinator Travel Grant awardee. These grants provided active DLF community contributors with funding to participate in DPLAfest 2015 in Indianapolis this past April. In this post, Laura recounts her experiences at the fest.

Through generous funding of the Alfred P. Sloan foundation, the Digital Public Library of America convened a two-day working meeting comprised of a diverse group of stakeholders to understand the current ecosystem for ebooks and unbundle pieces of this ecosystem to address the challenges ebooks present for libraries.

DPLAfest 2015 was one for the history books! Bringing together more than 300 people from across the country (and world!), this year’s DPLAfest was two-days worth of excellent conversations, workshops, networking, hacking, and more. Missed the action, or just looking for a one-stop summary of the event? Look no further — this post contains all media, outputs, and other materials associated with the second annual DPLAfest in Indianapolis.

On the second anniversary of the Digital Public Library of America’s launch, DPLA announced a number of new partnerships, initiatives, and milestones that highlight its rapid growth, and prepare it to have an even larger impact in the years ahead. At DPLAfest 2015 in Indianapolis, hundreds of people from DPLA’s expanding community gathered to discuss DPLA’s present and future.

DPLAFest attendees encourage their fellow DPLAFest participants to support LGBTQ youth in Indiana by contributing to a crowd funding campaign for Indiana Youth Group.

There’s lots to do in the Indianapolis area during DPLAfest. Here is just a sampling of some of the excellent options.

The DPLA Technical Advisory Committee will lead an open committee call on Wednesday, April 8 at 2:00 PM Eastern. To register, complete the short registration form available here.

Join us for a two-day hackathon during DPLAfest 2015 (Indianapolis, April 17-18) to collaborate with members of the DPLA community and build something awesome with our API. A hackathon is a concentrated period of time for creative people to come together and make something new. In their excellent hackathon planning guide, DPLA community reps Chad Nelson and Nabil Kashyap described a hackathon as “an alternative space–outside of day-to-day assignments, project management procedures, and decision-making processes–to think differently about a problem, a tool, a dataset, or even an institution.”

The DPLAFest schedule is packed with interesting sessions–everything from Ebooks, to project management, to digitization, and education, has a space in the lineup. A set of those programs is related to the DPLA Hubs and the work that they do. In addition to showcasing the incredible work being done by institutions that are part of the DPLA Hub network, it’s a great way for attendees from aspiring Hubs to find out more about the application process. Here are some Hub Highlights from this year’s fest:

In my social media feeds yesterday, I saw some friends and acquaintances say that they were reconsidering their attendance at DPLAfest, scheduled to be held in Indianapolis, IN, April 17-18, in light of the recent signing of SEA 101, or the “Religious Freedom Restoration Act,” into law by Governor Pence of Indiana. I must admit that as an openly gay employee at DPLA, I had an immediate and strong negative reaction. I was unhappy about my organization spending money in a place that would allow businesses not to serve me simply because I am gay. However, after more thought and a night of sleep, I have come to a different conclusion. The passing of this law should make us all want to attend DPLAfest even more than we might have before.