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

DPLA is pleased to welcome the NJ/DE Digital Collective as DPLA’s newest service hub. The NJ/DE Digital Collective is a collaboration launched by the New Jersey State Library (NJSL) and Delaware Division of Libraries (DDL) that serves libraries and cultural heritage institutions throughout New Jersey and Delaware. More than 20 organizations are currently contributing to DPLA through the NJ/DE Digital Collective including NJSL, DDL, Rutgers University, the University of Delaware, Princeton Theological Seminary, and Princeton University.

Digital Public Library of America is pleased to announce that more than 50,000 new cultural heritage artifacts from the Orbis Cascade Alliance are now available at dp.la. The Orbis Cascade is a consortium of 37 academic libraries in the Pacific Northwest. The Alliance’s first hub submissions include cultural resources contributed by member institutions in Oregon, Washington, and Idaho.

The DPLA team is pleased to share the news that Director of Community Engagement Shaneé Yvette Murrain has been named one of Library Journal’s Movers & Shakers for 2021.

DPLA is pleased to welcome Northwest Digital Heritage as DPLA’s newest service hub. Northwest Digital Heritage is a collaboration between the Washington State Library, State Library of Oregon, and Oregon Heritage Commission that serves libraries and cultural heritage institutions across the Pacific Northwest region. More than 70 institutions are currently contributing to DPLA through Northwest […]

How can artificial intelligence and machine learning help organize, describe, and provide access to the growing volume of materials in digital libraries and archives? This was the central question of a workshop series hosted by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and the University Libraries at Virginia Tech (VT).

Thank you to everyone who joined us on Wednesday for our 2021 Members Meeting around building inclusion in a digital world and our network’s IDEAS (inclusion, diversity, equity, access, and social justice) work. We so enjoyed re-connecting with all of you and learning about your efforts to turn the corner from talking about equity and inclusion to actually determining what that means to every aspect of our work, from search and discovery to metadata to partnerships. We were inspired by your energy, enthusiasm, and thoughtfulness about the path ahead of us.

We are pleased to invite you to join us at the inaugural DPLA Book Talk, which will feature a conversation between Mistrust author Ethan Zuckerman and Wikimedia Foundation CEO and DPLA board member Katherine Maher, moderated by Knight Foundation CEO Alberto Ibargüen.

With expanded vaccine access, many of us have begun to conceive of what our post-Covid worlds might look like. These visions are necessarily colored by all that we have learned during the last year—from the benefits of flexible working arrangements to the urgent need to finally dismantle systemic racism in our work.

Early last year, DPLA embarked on a new project, supported by Sloan Foundation, to make images from DPLA’s aggregation of more than 40 million cultural heritage artifacts accessible to vast new audiences via Wikimedia. January 2021 marked the one-year anniversary of this project, and we wanted to share with you some of the exciting outcomes thus far:

This is the fourth and final post in a series from DPLA’s Audrey Altman about the curatorial and technological challenges involved in the development of the Black Women’s Suffrage Digital Collection. As a data engineer, Audrey worked alongside the curators Shaneé Yvette Murrain and Kathleen Williams to address underlying biases in the collection and surface representative stories about Black women’s contributions to voting rights movements.