John Palfrey is President of the DPLA Board of Directors, and will be serving as a periodic columnist for Library Journal to discuss the “issues surrounding the efforts to launch and expand the Digital Public Library of America.”
Below is an excerpt from Palfrey’s column for Library Journal, titled “Building a Digital Public Library of America“:
“Above the front doors of the Boston Public Library (BPL) appear the words: “Free to all.” These three words face Copley Square and, beyond that, Trinity Church, the Massachusetts State House, and eventually Boston Harbor, our city’s historic gateway to the markets of the world.
“The Boston Public Library, America’s first publicly funded municipal library, will host a celebration in April, 2013 to launch, officially, a project that is based upon these same three words. The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) is an ambitious, broad-based effort to establish a new library platform for our digitally-mediated age.
“The planning for a DPLA began in October, 2010, when thirty people, representing a range of disciplines, met at the Radcliffe Institute in Cambridge, MA, to talk about whether we might work together to establish a national digital library for our country. At the end of the meeting, everyone agreed to a single sentence: to work toward “an open, distributed network of comprehensive online resources that would draw on the nation’s living heritage from libraries, universities, archives, and museums in order to educate, inform and empower everyone in the current and future generations.”
“Since that time, the DPLA planning effort has gained substantial momentum. It has brought together thousands of people from libraries, archives, museums, technology companies, private foundations, public agencies, and many other backgrounds, in an extended “design charette” to envision what we might build together.”
Read the full column here where he elaborates on What is it?, DPLA and Libraries, Coping with Copyright, Getting Ready to Launch, and Finding the Funding.
Photo courtesy of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society on Flickr; used under a BY-NC-SA 2.0 license. From John Palfrey’s Chair Lecture November 11, 2010.