A single point of access to the riches of America’s cultural heritage stewarded by libraries, archives, and museums across the nation. Ten years ago, that was the audacious founding vision of DPLA. To more fully realize that vision, DPLA has pioneered a program that connects our nation’s cultural heritage to Wikimedia Commons and Wikipedia. Late last month, DPLA presented more about this work at ALA’s inaugural LibLearn X in New Orleans. 

A $750,000 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to the Digital Public Library of America will fuel a multi-year effort to connect America’s cultural heritage institutions with Wikipedia, the world’s free online encyclopedia. This grant will offer an opportunity to make millions of cultural treasures from hundreds of American libraries, archives, and museums freely available online, including Renaissance manuscripts from Philadelphia’s Science History Institute; historic photos of the Pacific Northwest from Seattle Public Library; and portraits of 18th-century actors from the University of Illinois.

This is the second blog in a series from DPLA’s Digital Equity Project: Advancing Racial Justice in American Libraries. (You can find the first here.) This month, I am pleased to share with you an update from Teresa Cain, Sarah Gherghel, and Debbie Rubenstein at Charlotte Mecklenburg Library on the library’s Living Archives, one of […]

This is the first blog in a series from DPLA’s Digital Equity Project: Advancing Racial Justice in American Libraries. Derek Webb, Head of Archives at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries shares how the partnership between the Libraries and The Milwaukee Women’s Art Library and their collaboration on a new community ambassador position seeks to bridge […]

Digital Public Library of America recently launched a new application to run a core part of its infrastructure, the DPLA API. This software upgrade improves security, performance, reliability, and privacy for our users. It also allows developers to adapt to new services and maintain the code over time. The DPLA tech team transitioned to the […]

Over the summer, we gave a wide-ranging update on the accomplishments of our Wikimedia Project to date and promised forthcoming news on what’s coming up next. In the last few months, we have launched several new projects with renewed funding, and we are also working to increase collaboration and idea-sharing with the launch of the new Wikimedia Working Group.

On Tuesday, we gathered with more than 70 of our colleagues for an information session on our recently announced Digital Equity Project. Our goal was to give some context and background on the project, share information on our big-picture plans and the opportunities this new funding presents, and answer questions from our community.  In 2019, […]

Today, I am pleased to share that we have partnered with an initial cohort of three organizations to form a Digital Equity Project Community of Practice: Charlotte Mecklenburg Library; Seattle Public Library; and DPLA’s Recollection Wisconsin Hub / University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries. Each of these organizations will receive subgrant awards to pursue a project dedicated to digital capacity building.

Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) is pleased to announce an $850,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation to support its effort to advance racial justice in American archives. This funding will enable DPLA to launch a digital equity project to develop community-based partners and increase partner capacity to lead this work. The three-year project will provide support for underrepresented, under-resourced archives and expand DPLA’s capacity for supporting and partnering with diverse archival projects.

Dear Friends of DPLA, We are looking forward to being back at ALA Annual in just a couple of short weeks, and hope to see many of you in person for the first time in far too long. We are pleased to share that there will be several opportunities to gather with DPLA colleagues and […]

With over 200 million pieces of metadata from about 1 million items—and these have already received over 100 million page views. As we wrap up the second year of this initiative, we’d like to share some of our outcomes so far, and discuss the new phase we will soon enter.

Last week, the DPLA community gathered to explore two topics critical to our mission of advancing equitable access to knowledge for all.  On Monday, April 11, at our quarterly Open Board + Community Meeting, Kelvin Watson, DPLA board member and executive director of the Las Vegas-Clark County Library District, moderated a conversation with two librarians […]

Curatorial work with large archival collections is challenging.  In order to find artifacts related to a chosen topic, curators have to sift through thousands – sometimes millions – of materials and determine which are truly relevant.  Machine learning can help streamline curatorial workflows by analyzing complex datasets and making some of their underlying patterns legible. 

Dear Friends of DPLA, In DPLA’s 2019 strategy, we articulated a three-pronged mission-driven approach that guides all of our work. One of these guidelines is our optimism about and belief in the transformational potential of technology for unleashing knowledge and enabling creativity. And, furthermore, we believe that libraries and cultural heritage institutions can and must […]

Several times a year, DPLA Chief Technology Officer Michael Della Bitta shares updates on our tech team’s projects, processes, and works-in-progress. This is his first update of 2022.

DPLA board member Felton Thomas, President and CEO of Cleveland Public Library, reflects on our latest Open Board and Community Meeting.

We invite you to attend our first Open Board + Community meeting of 2022 this coming Monday, January 10, at 2 pm ET. In addition to an update from DPLA, the meeting will feature a conversation with library and education leaders about the future of digital access.

As 2021 draws to a close, all of us at DPLA wish to extend our gratitude for all of your efforts to advance our work this year. As we look back on the progress we’ve made in 2021, we know none of it would be possible without the talent and dedication of our community. We […]

Earlier this week, DPLA hosted Addressing Health Misinformation Through Community, a conversation with U.S. Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy and Knight Foundation. The gathering brought together a set of library, civic, and philanthropic leaders to discuss practical ways to counter health misinformation.  The scourge of misinformation is not an abstract issue, it is an urgent […]

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) today welcomes four library and civic leaders to our board of directors: Joshua Frazier-Sparks, Director of Culture, Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion at Walmart; Joseph Lucia, Dean of Libraries at Temple University; Marcia Walker-McWilliams, Executive Director of the Black Metropolis Research Consortium and Kelvin Watson, Executive Director of Las Vegas-Clark County Library District