We are excited to welcome our newest hub to DPLA! The collections of the Big Sky Country Digital Network are now available to explore in the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). The new Montana Service Hub represents a collaborative effort between the Montana State Library (MSL), the Montana Historical Society (MHS), the University of Montana (UM), and Montana State University (MSU). Together, these organizations have made thousands of new resources accessible via DPLA. As with all Service Hubs, Big Sky Digital Network brings its own unique, local history that allows DPLA represent the diversity of experiences across the country and collections that contribute to our common heritage.

On September 1, 2017, DPLA will launch the Hub Network Membership program. This program will create a closer, more formal collaboration between DPLA and the members of the Hub Network to achieve our common goals and is an essential step in providing a structure and framework to give Hubs a voice in the direction of […]

Our collections and our partner network are growing! The collections of our newest hub, Digital Maryland, are now searchable in the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) alongside millions of resources from partners across the country. Through the efforts of Digital Maryland and USMAI, over 83,000 new resources from public libraries, museums, historical societies, and college libraries are now available via DPLA.

We are pleased to announce that the collections of the Michigan Service Hub are officially ‘live’ in DPLA and ready to explore! Accepted to the DPLA network in 2015, the Michigan Service Hub represents a collaborative effort between the Library of Michigan, University of Michigan, Wayne State University, Michigan State University, Western Michigan University and the Midwest Collaborative for Library Services. As of this week, the Michigan Hub partners have made 42,000 new items discoverable in DPLA and plan to add more in the future.

The collections of the Illinois Digital Heritage Hub are officially live in DPLA and ready to explore. Our newest hub from Illinois represents a collaboration between the Illinois State Library, the Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Illinois (CARLI), Chicago Public Library, and, previously a Content Hub partner, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

DPLA Executive Director Dan Cohen and board members Amy Ryan and Mary Minow traveled to Washington, D.C. to meet with Librarian of Congress Dr. Carla Hayden as she signed the agreement Tuesday. While there, Cohen, Ryan, and Minow were treated to a behind-the-scenes look at a selection of the maps that will soon be available to all alongside treasured historical resources from libraries, museums and historical societies across the country.

The Library of Congress today signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the Digital Public Library of America to become a Content Hub and will ultimately share a significant portion of its rich digital resources with DPLA’s database of digital content records.

Last year, DPLA partnered with Pop Up Archive, a platform of tools for organizing and searching digital spoken word, to offer exclusive discounted services to DPLA partner organizations. One year after announcing our partnership, we are excited to join Pop Up Archive in highlighting some of the ways that their team has worked with DPLA partners to automatically transcribe, timestamp, and provide team editing interfaces for audio collections.

In 2015, DPLA announced the formation of the Archival Description Working Group to find ways to accommodate this diversity in descriptive practice within our data. Today that group is releasing its whitepaper, “Aggregating and Representing Collections in the Digital Public Library of America.”

As our newest Service Hub, Recollection Wisconsin has made some 400,000 new records representing photographs, books, maps, artifacts and other historical resources from more than 200 Wisconsin collections accessible in DPLA.

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) and FamilySearch International, the largest genealogy organization in the world, have signed an agreement that will expand access to FamilySearch.org’s growing free digital historical book collection to DPLA’s broad audience of users including genealogists, researchers, family historians, students, and more.

We’re pleased to invite our extended community to attend a free two-part DPLA workshop webinar, RightsStatements.org: Why We Need It, What It Is (and Isn’t) and What Does It Mean for the DPLA Network and Beyond? Over the course of two workshops, Emily Gore, DPLA, and Greg Cram, NYPL, will discuss the recently launched RightsStatements.org project.

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.

The Digital Public Library of America and Europeana are proud to announce the launch of RightsStatements.org, developed in partnership with Creative Commons, Kennisland and key stakeholders of the DPLA and Europeana networks. RightsStatements.org is a collaborative approach to rights statements that can be used to communicate the copyright status of cultural objects.

The Digital Public Library of America is partnering with Pop Up Archive to offer discounted services to the DPLA network. DPLA Hubs and their partners will be able to take advantage of this discounted rate to make it possible for anyone to search and pinpoint exact search terms and phrases within audiovisual collections.

Fifty years ago this October, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 was signed into law, forever changing American immigration policy and the country’s demographics. The 1965 law abolished quota systems established in the 1920s that put restrictions on earlier waves of immigration, and allowed for many groups of non-European immigrants to enter the country.

We are pleased to announce the membership of the Archival Description Working Group. In addition, we have appointed an Advisory Board that will help the workgroup by reviewing drafts before public release and providing feedback on workplans and tools.

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.