Jennifer Howard discusses the progress made during the plenary.
“The Digital Public Library of America doesn’t exist yet, but it’s closer to becoming a reality.
At an energized meeting held here at the National Archives on Friday, representatives from top cultural institutions and public and research libraries expressed robust support for the proposed library, which would create a portal to allow the public to get easy online access to collections held at many different institutions.”
From Jennifer Howard’s article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “A National Digital Public Library Begins to Take Shape”
Peter Brantley reports from the Plenary on collective licenses.
“I am in Washington, DC for the public launch of the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), filling my time between workgroup sessions meeting with lawyers engaged in these issues. Oddly, that’s a lot of fun, because the future landscape of copyright and access will in some part be shaped by their thoughts and actions, and these are interesting times for all of us. And, if it weren’t for such meetings, I would not have known about an otherwise obscure report containing an interesting analysis of copyright licensing that could bear on libraries and publishing.”
From Peter Brantley’s blog post for Publisher’s Weekly, “Dividing Collective Licenses”
Amanda French’s speech from the plenary on the soul and body of the library.
“I want a building. A public building, not a data center, not a warehouse. I do not need a building, but I want it with the irrational desire of a lover. I know that it’s not on the radar of the DPLA project yet, but I wanted to plant the seed of that idea today. A monument to the ideal of an informed citizenry, a culturally, intellectually, and emotionally enriched citizenry.”
From Amanda French’s speech, “Aubade: The Soul and Body of a Library”
Nate Hill responds to his work with the Audience & Participation workstream at the DPLA conference.
“So in conclusion I’d say it’s nice to feel like we are moving forward, and touch briefly on Amanda French’s idea that we need to have a building- a giant DPLA structure- a monument to this effort and to digital knowledge. I’m very much in agreement that this will need a physical footprint and that merely building a web platform, code, and APIs is not enough. That said, a centralized building feels like a mistake to me, and I’d suggest that some kind of distributed, networked architecture that is visable in, on or around library locations across the country would be more effective. We have a public library infrastructure, it’s amazing, and we should be proud to transition it into this new time. I don’t doubt that a centralized building will exist for the DPLA one day, it is almost instinctive to build monuments to great efforts. But any public librarian will tell you this: it’s in the library branches where all the real action is. That is where we need the physical manifestation of this thing.”
From Nate Hill’s blog post on the Public Library Association website, “First thoughts after the DPLA launch and workstream meetings”
Hiawatha Bray of the Boston Globe reports on the DPLA.
“A consortium of librarians and scholars from across the country, including faculty members from Harvard University, met yesterday in Washington to work on creating the proposed Digital Public Library of America, an online storehouse stocked with millions of digitized books, images, and video from the nation’s top public and academic libraries.”
From Hiawatha Bray’s article, “US Digital Library in Works”
Further reading: