On January 22, at 2 pm eastern, we will be hosting a webinar about metadata aggregation. We’ll be taking an inside look at aggregation best practices at two of our DPLA Service Hubs in North Carolina and South Carolina. In addition, DPLA has been working on improving our existing tools as well as creating some new ones for metadata aggregation and quality control.We’d like to share what’s in place and preview some of our plans and we hope to get feedback on future directions.

The Digital Public Library of America seeks applicants to serve as Service Hubs and Content Hubs in our growing national network. The applications and corresponding instructions are now available.

The Digital Commonwealth’s “metadata mob” is a fun and creative type of mob — less roughneck and more spontaneous dance routine. Except, instead of wildly cavorting to Do-Re-Mi in train stations, they cut-and-paste, transcribe, script, spell check, authorize, regularize, refine, edit, and enhance.

Digitization efforts in the US have, to date, been overwhelmingly dominated by academic libraries, but public libraries are increasingly finding a niche by looking to their local collections as sources for original content. The Hennepin County Library has partnered with the Minnesota Digital Library (MDL)—and now the Digital Public Library of America—to bring thousands of items to the digital realm from its extensive holdings in the James K. Hosmer Special Collections Department. These items include maps, atlases, programs, annual reports, photographs, diaries, advertisements, and trade catalogs.

Heather Harren, Education and Outreach Manager at the Blue Earth County Historical Society in Mankato, MN, describes the national attention that has been brought to her organization through their participation as a contributor to the Minnesota Digital Library and DPLA.

Washington, DC & BOSTON — The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) announced today a $999,485 grant to the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) for a major expansion of its infrastructure.

More awesome news from DPLA! Hot on the heels of announcements about newly added materials from the Medical Heritage Library and the Government Printing Office, we’re excited to share that some 92,000 items from the J. Paul Getty Trust are now also available.

We were pleased to share yesterday that nearly 60,000 items from the Medical Heritage Library have made their way into DPLA, and we’re now doubly pleased to share that nearly 150,000 items from the Government Printing Office’s (GPO) Catalog of U.S. Government Publications (CGP) are now also available via DPLA.

The Medical Heritage Library (MHL) is pleased to announce that MHL content can now be discovered through the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). The MHL, a specialized research collection stored in the Internet Archive, currently includes nearly 60,000 digital rare books, serials, audio and video recordings, and ephemera in the history of medicine, public health, biomedical sciences, and popular medicine from the medical special collections of 22 academic, special, and public libraries.

Bob Sandeen describes the Nicollet County Historical Society’s experience as a contributing institution to the Minnesota Digital Library and the DPLA.

The DPLA is pleased to announce an update to the Metadata Application Profile (MAP). The DPLA MAP is the basis for how data is structured and validated in DPLA, and guides how data is stored, serialized, and made available through our API in JSON-LD. The MAP is based on the Europeana Data Model (EDM), and integrates the experience and specific needs for aggregating the data of America’s cultural heritage institutions.

Patricia Maus discusses her experiences at the University of Minnesota Duluth as a contributing institution to the Minnesota Digital Library and the DPLA.

In April 2014, after research and planning, the Public Library Partnerships Project team started to convene one-day workshops for public librarians interested in digitization. Each hub—Digital Commonwealth, Digital Library of Georgia, Minnesota Digital Library, and Mountain West Digital Library—gave a workshop in the spring. We then met as group to discuss the curriculum and make necessary changes for the later workshops. We also relied on feedback from participants in the first workshops and the survey and informal feedback they had offered about their experiences. Since that meeting, we’ve continue to give workshops: so far eight more with an additional five scheduled through the end of September.

Stephen Zietz is the Head of Special Collections and Archives at Georgia State University. The department has a staff of six professional librarian/archivists and four paraprofessionals and is distributed across campus in five locations. Over the last six years, Special Collections and Archives has expanded it collections scope and reenergized its oral history program.

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) announced today that it has received $300,000 from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation as part of its Knight News Challenge, an open contest seeking ideas that strengthen the Internet for free expression and innovation.

The following guest blog post is by Chelcie Rowell, Digital Initiatives Librarian at Wake Forest University’s Z. Smith Reynolds (ZSR) Library. Twenty-eight collections from ZSR’s WakeSpace Digital Collections appear in the DPLA via the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center Service Hub.

The George A. Smathers Libraries at the University of Florida (UF) have partnered with DPLA by contributing more than 390,000 items, including antique maps, rare books, manuscripts, photographs, oral histories, newspapers, and research publications. All will become accessible to DPLA’s global audience of students, teachers, scholars, developers, and the public.

This week marks the one-year anniversary of the launch of the Digital Public Library of America (http://dp.la), a groundbreaking all-digital library that brings together millions of items from America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world. In celebration, DPLA is proud to announce the addition of five major new partners and other significant milestones that attest to the tremendous momentum the project has as it enters its second year.

It’s hard to believe that a year has already gone by since our launch last April. It’s been a whirlwind here in the Boston headquarters of DPLA, and across DPLA’s ever-expanding national network of libraries, archives, museums, and cultural heritage sites. The surging numbers in our collection—6.7 million items from over 1300 contributing institutions, up from 2.4 million and 500 a year ago—attest to the tremendous momentum we’ve achieved.

The U.S. Copyright Office has asked for comments on a proposed new right for copyright holders, the “making available” right, which would restrict the ability to link to content the open web. With the help of DPLA Legal Committee member Dave Hansen, Dan Cohen filed a response.