Ben Schmidt and Martin Camacho from the Cultural Observatory at Harvard University sat down with me earlier this week to speak about their Beta Sprint project, Bookworm.
They are miles apart in their thinking about digital books, but the Association of American Publishers’ (AAP) president, Tom Allen, and Harvard University library director Robert Darnton came face to face to discuss the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) on October 11
Jeffrey Schnapp, faculty director of the metaLAB (at) Harvard, discusses extraMUROS, one of nine Beta Sprint projects selected for presentation at the October 21 plenary meeting.
The DPLA will make available tools and services to other libraries, such as open source code and a store of metadata, but content was a big part of what it hopes to offer.
The project prototype leverages the Institute of Museum and Library Services’ Digital Collections and Content (IMLS DCC) resource and DLF Aquifer content as a core collection for the DPLA.
From my perspective as a library science student, it seems to me that the DPLA has an opportunity to become a catalyst for a large-scale turn in how we as a society choose to organize and contextualize our collective knowledge online.
“We feel that extraMUROS and Zeega can be particularly powerful in helping the DPLA forge alliances between cultural heritage institutions of all types and scales, allowing citizen scholars, teachers, local historical societies, public libraries, schools, colleges, museums and libraries to form an interconnected web of shared knowledge.”
“The minds behind the Digital Public Library of America are thinking very big. Can they succeed where others have failed?”
From Micah Vandegrift: “I’ve been following the development of the DPLA for about a year now, and the conversations surrounding it have been almost as exciting as the idea itself. So what exactly is the idea?”
“The DPLA will make our cultural heritage available not to consume, but to parse, sort, analyze, visualize, remix, and redisplay.”
