Library Stuff

“The Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is joining with the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) to provide online access to thousands of historical materials archived at Illinois. As part of the cooperative partnership, the University Library will contribute metadata for 15 of its digital image collections.” (via Digital Public Library of America)

“The beginnings of the first public, national, on-line library will soon be unveiled in Boston – home to the country’s first publicly supported municipal library. A prototype of the Digital Public Library of America, or DPLA, will launch during a two-day event, which will include a series of events April 18 and 19 at the Boston Public Library, according to leaders of the digital library. The project’s primary focus is to make materials from the United States available through its on-line platform. Initially, the project will concentrate on written records – books, magazines, manuscripts, digital text – and eventually hopes to include other media, like images, movies and audio.” (via Boston.com)

“ARTstor is partnering with the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) to provide access to more than 10,000 high-quality images from six leading museums. As part of its collaboration with ARTstor, the DPLA will aggregate and make available data records and links to images from six major American museums: the Dallas Museum of Art, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art (paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Collection), the Walters Art Museum, the Yale Center for British Art, and the Yale University Art Gallery. In addition to linking to the original contributing museum’s own website, each DPLA record will link to the image in Open ARTstor, a new ARTstor initiative that allows users to view and download large versions of public domain images.” (via Digital Public Library of America)

“The Smithsonian Institution will join with the Digital Public Library of America to provide links to a wealth of the Institution’s cultural and scientific content. The DPLA pilot project, which combines and centralizes links to the collections of participating cultural institutions, launches April 18 in Boston. The Smithsonian will serve as a digital content hub within the DPLA network, which provides links to the Smithsonian’s digital collection of books, journals, museum objects, manuscripts and videos. Through the DPLA, the Smithsonian Libraries will collaborate with renowned libraries, universities, archives and museums to reach a wide national audience.(via Digital Public Library of America)

“Archivist of the United States David S. Ferriero announced today that the National Archives, as a leading content provider to the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), will help launch its first pilot project. The DPLA is a large-scale, collaborative project across government, research institutions, museums, libraries and archives to build a digital library platform to make America’s cultural and scientific history free and publicly available anytime, anywhere, online through a single access point.”

via Digital Public Library of America

“A LibraryBox is an open source, portable digital file distribution tool based on inexpensive hardware that enables delivery of educational, healthcare, and other vital information to individuals off the grid. Folks have been using them to distribute digital content (books, movies, audio and more) and provide access to digital resources to communities of users that do not have access to the internet or where internet access is limited or censored. At SXSWi  the SXSWLAM group, working in conjunction with the UT iSchool are planning to load and distribute 10 LibraryBoxen throughout the SXSWi venue. A portion will be mounted on pedicabs, others will be carried around by volunteers, and others will be placed at the IdeaDrop house (http://erl2013.sched.org), at the Culture Hack panel, and other places where we want to inspire the SXSW participants to check out the “library” and interact with the resources we are making available.”

via Digital Public Library of America

“The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) announced today the appointment of Dan Cohen as the DPLA’s founding Executive Director.  Cohen, currently a tenured professor in the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University and the Director of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, brings to the DPLA more than a decade of experience in digital humanities and a deep commitment to the future of libraries, archives, and museums.  Cohen will begin his tenure on April 18, 2013.”

via Digital Public Library of America

“The Digital Public Library of America will launch on April 18 after two and a half years of careful planning and preparation. The project known as DPLA is the first national effort that seeks to aggregate existing records in state and regional digital libraries so that they are searchable from a single portal. Up until now, the documents that tell the story of our nation’s history and cultural heritage have largely been siloed in state and local libraries, museums, and archives. Some institutions have the ability to digitize those valuable materials and put them online, but strained budgets mean that most do not. The project’s funding will also allow it to work with local communities to digitize their cultural-heritage—preserving them for the future and bringing them online as part of our first national digital library.”

via Knight Foundation

“Last week, the beta version of Germany’s new national digital library, the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek (DDB) launched. Unlike many of the other new digital platforms I’ve blogged about recently, which provide a single body of content (the collection of a specific museum, Shakespeare’s ouvre, etc.) the DDB functions as a central content hub for a truly decentralized corpus of resources. While there are a few clear centers from which the DDB’s resources originate (Berlin, Dresden, Stuttgart…), a look at the DDB’s map of contributing institutions shows a combination of libraries, museums, and archives distributed fairly evenly throughout Germany.”

via Digital Public Library of America

“As the Digital Public Library of America approaches its April 2013 launch, copyright laws still hinder the library’s ability to make a wide array of written materials accessible to the public. Two years into its initial efforts—the DPLA was first envisioned in October 2010, soon after Harvard withdrew its collections from the Google Books digitization project due to legal concerns—primary founding member and Harvard University librarian Robert C. Darnton ’60 boasts that the DPLA has the potential to become the “mother of all libraries.” But as the project moves forward, the problem of digitizing copyrighted material, essential for public collections, remains unsolved.

via The Harvard Crimson