Through the Public Library Partnerships Project (PLPP), DPLA has been working with existing DPLA Service Hubs to provide digital skills training for public librarians and connect them sustainably with state and regional resources for digitizing, describing, and exhibiting their cultural heritage content. Through the project workshops, we used this curriculum to introduce 150 public librarians to the digitization process. Now at the end of the project, we’ve made this curriculum available in a self-guided version intended for digitization beginners from a variety of cultural heritage institutions.

Over the past fifteen months, representatives from the Europeana and DPLA networks, in partnership with Creative Commons, have been developing a collaborative approach to internationally interoperable rights statements that can be used to communicate the copyright status of cultural objects published via the DPLA and Europeana platforms.

Wouldn’t libraries and archives like to be able to digitize their collections and make the texts and images available to the world online? Of course they would, but copyright inhibits this for most works created in the last 100 years.

The U.S. Copyright Office recently issued a report and a request for comments on its proposal for a new licensing system intended overcome copyright obstacles to mass digitization. While the goal is laudable, the Office’s proposal is troubling and vague in key respects.

At DPLA, our metadata application profile and access platform have been centered on an item-centric library model for description: one metadata record for each individual digital object. While this method works well for most of the items in DPLA, it doesn’t translate to the way many archives are creating records for their digital objects. Instead, these institutions are applying an aggregate description to their objects. Since DPLA works with organizations that use both the item-level and aggregation-based description practices, we need a way to support both. The Archival Description Working Group will help us get there.

DPLA is pleased to announce the publication of 10 new exhibitions created by DPLA Hubs and public librarian participants in our Gates-funded Public Library Partnerships Project (PLPP).

The Digital Public Library of America is pleased to announce the addition of four Service Hubs that will be joining our Hub network. The Hubs represent Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The addition of these Hubs continues our efforts to help build local community and capacity, and further efforts to build an on-ramp to DPLA participation for every cultural heritage institution in the United States and its territories.

The most important word in discussions around copyright in the United States is balance. Although there are many, often strong disagreements between copyright holders and those who wish to provide greater access to our cultural heritage, few dispute that the goal is to balance the interests of the public with those of writers, artists, and other creators.

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) is on the way to connecting online collections from coast to coast by 2017 – an effort boosted by a new $3.4 million investment, comprising $1.9 million from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and $1.5 million from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. These two new awards, coupled with significant earlier support from the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the National Endowment for the Humanities, will allow DPLA to open new Service Hubs that provide a way for all cultural heritage organizations across the country to connect through one national collection.

The Digital Public Library of America seeks applicants to serve as Service Hubs in our growing national network.

In this post, Anna Neatrour describes one of her typical days as the Mountain West Digital Library metadata librarian aggregating data on a regional level and as a Service Hub with DPLA.

Within the Technical Working Group of the International Rights Statements Working Group, we have been focusing our efforts on identifying a set of requirements and a technically sound and sustainable plan to implement the rights statements under development. Now that two of the Working Group’s white papers have been released, we realized it was a good time to build on the introductory blog post by our Co-Chairs, Emily Gore and Paul Keller. Accordingly, we hope this post provides a good introduction to our technical white paper, Recommendations for the Technical Infrastructure for Standardized International Rights Statements, and more generally, how our thinking has changed throughout the activities of the working group.

Over the past twelve months representatives from Europeana, the DPLA and Creative Commons have been exploring the possibilities for a collaborative approach to rights statements that can be used to communicate the copyright status of cultural objects published via our platforms. This work is close to the heart of both Europeana and the DPLA as we both seek to share clear and accurate information about copyright status with users.

New York is home to nine library and research councils that comprise the NY3Rs Association, Inc. (NY3Rs). While it occupies its own dark blue circle in the image above, Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO), home to our Service Hub, is one of the nine regional councils that make up the NY3Rs. In addition to myriad digital content hosted at individual organizations statewide (the small gray circles in the diagram), New York is also home to four large-scale collaborative digital projects. These projects are all supported and facilitated by the NY3Rs regional councils.

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:

The Internet Archive and the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) are pleased to announce a joint collaborative program to enhance sharing of collections from the Internet Archive in the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). The Internet Archive will work with interested Libraries and content providers to help ensure their metadata meets DPLA’s standards and requirements. After their content is digitized, the metadata would then be ready for ingestion into the DPLA if the content provider has a current DPLA provider agreement.

The Minnesota Digital Library (MDL) is one of four DPLA Service Hubs to be sub-awarded a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, through the DPLA, for the Public Library Partnership Project (PLPP). In this post, Carla Urban details MDL’s experience working on the project with public librarians in Minnesota.

Hot on the heels of last week’s announcement of KriKri and Heidrun, we here at DPLA HQ are excited to release the newest revision of the DPLA Metadata Application Profile, version 4.0 (DPLA MAP v4.0).

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) is pleased to announce the addition of four Service Hubs that will be joining our Hub network. The Hubs represent Tennessee, Maryland, Maine and the Caribbean. The addition of these Hubs continues our efforts to help build local community and capacity, and further efforts to build an on-ramp to DPLA participation for every cultural heritage institution in the United States and its territories.

Thanks to all of you who attended our webinar. We had a great turnout and hope you found it interesting and informative. As promised, you can now find the video for our recent Metadata Aggregation webinar below or over at our Vimeo account. Links to download each presenter’s slides are included in this post as well. Unfortunately, we didn’t have enough time to get to all of the questions that came up during the webinar. However, our presenters agreed to answer a few more in writing for our blog. You can find them below in the Extended Q&A section.

Last week, Dan Cohen shared the DPLA’s 2015-2017 strategic plan including DPLA’s goals for community-driven growth and collaborative expansion. Now seems like a good time, too, to look back at the work that our partners and we have done over the past year to increase the numbers and diversity of formats, topics, institutions, and collections that are offered through DPLA.