We received nearly 40 final submissions to our summer 2011 Beta Sprint, an open call for code and concepts defining how the DPLA should operate. Submissions ranged widely from theoretical concepts to platforms for visual storytelling to metadata processing systems to visualization tools.
We are grateful to those who participated — government agencies, non-profit organizations, academic research teams, librarians, and inspired individuals — for the tremendous creativity and remarkable effort they contributed to this process, and we are pleased to share their submissions here for public comment.
extraMUROS proposes to shape the Digital Public Library of America into a multimedia-library-without-walls through an open source, HTML5 platform.
»
“Dying To Tell A Story” proposes a digital archival system accessible by a web-based user interface to anyone who wishes to put down a record in either audio or video format of their lives, the lives of others or any event of their choosing.
»
The icfind project features a tool to find collections of images from public libraries.
»
This submission suggests there is a pressing need for a digital public law library to provide greater access to the law.
»
The proposed DPLA Center for Scholarship and Academic Discourse is a database that would include users who are good at contextualizing sources—teachers, faculty, scientists, engineers, writers, humanists, lawyers, alumni, tutors, businesspeople, entrepreneurs etc.—to encourage research and learning.
»
This Beta Sprint projects takes Mardi, Herman Melville’s largely neglected “philosophical romance,” as emblematic of the evolving and spontaneous storytelling style characteristic of both oral and digital narratives.
»
The Use & Understand project aims to distinguish the DPLA from other digital libraries, by emphasizing “use & understand.” These processes and functions enable the reader to ask and answer questions of large and small sets of documents relatively easily.
»
ShelfLife is intended to provide users with a rich environment for exploring the combined content of the DPLA, discovering new works, and engaging more deeply with them via social interactions
»
The Proteus project proposes the development and deployment of Proteus, an infrastructure that would enable library patrons to discover and find connections within and across books, such as statistics on quotations recurring over time, what portions of books are republished, and searching the books’ contents.
»
This Sprint project addresses issues of interoperability across repositories of content, suggesting ways the DPLA might transcend these obstacles.
»
