This is a guest post by Ben Lee, Assistant Professor, University of Washington Information School. In the context of public libraries, artificial intelligence (AI) has elicited a wide spectrum of responses. On the one hand, it brings excitement surrounding new possibilities for public programming, collection development, and staff usage. On the other hand, it elicits […]

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 […]

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.

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).

Just a year ago, the world of work underwent a seismic shift as a result of the COVID pandemic. DPLA, in some ways, was more ready for this kind of change than other teams — we were already distributed across the country, so we had already built the remote-working muscles needed to get things done during quarantine. And 99% of our operations were virtual as well, leaving essentially the main tangible change to be figuring out how to collect the mail.

Over the last couple of weeks, the DPLA technology team and I have spent some time evaluating the progress we made in the last year, and looking ahead to how we can make the biggest impact in 2021. I wanted to take a minute to update you on steps we are taking to improve access and discovery of artifacts in the DPLA aggregation.

We are pleased to announce the re-launch of DPLA’s API (Application Programming Interface). This marks the first time since 2013 that our API has had a significant software upgrade.

We just released a new Analytics Dashboard, a web application that provides our Member Hubs with detailed data about how their materials are being used, and the quality of their metadata records. In this post, we wanted to share the tools and services powering this new product behind the scenes.

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) has released a new, custom-built Analytics Dashboard for our Member Hubs. Through this easy-to-use web-based dashboard, our Members now have one-stop access to up-to-date information about how their rich collections of cultural heritage materials are being used.

The DPLA Tech Team has been hard at work this summer on a number of new projects, and we are excited to share some things we have “shipping” out this month.

We are pleased to announce a new website feature that allows users to create lists of items from across the Digital Public Library of America’s collections. With this new tool, users can easily save great materials discovered on DPLA’s website to come back to again and again without having to repeat a search.

Director of Technology Michael Della Bitta provides an update on the work of the DPLA Tech Team over the past year and provides a preview of priorities ahead over the coming year.

Last month DPLA released an update to our Metadata Application Profile (MAP), bringing us up to version 5.0. DPLA Data Services Coordinator Gretchen Gueguen explains the new features in MAP 5.0 and how they will impact our website, services, and partners.

Hydra-in-a-Box project partners Stanford University, DuraSpace, and the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) announce next steps following the completion of IMLS-funded project to develop Hyku, a scalable, performant, and multi-tenant digital content repository solution within the Samvera (previously known as Hydra) framework.

The DPLA is launching an open-source tool for fast, large-scale data harvests from OAI repositories. The tool uses a Spark distributed processing engine to speed up and scale up the harvesting operation, and to perform complex analysis of the harvested data. It is helping us improve our internal workflows and provide better service to our hubs. The Spark OAI Harvester is freely available and we hope that others working with interoperable cultural heritage or science data will find uses for it in their own projects.

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.”

Following several studies about the use and usability of the DPLA website, we’ve just completed a set of small but significant changes. We believe these changes will create a more pleasant, intuitive experience on our website, connecting people more easily with the cultural heritage materials our partners provide.

The guiding principles for our work are best understood through the core values that inform how we work together within our team, as well as with our colleagues at DPLA and across the network of our stakeholders and collaborators.