“I believe that the first iteration of the DPLA will be an intentional, measured venture into creating a semantic web for all things ‘cultural heritage’, and that it’s underlying structure and standards are going to let libraries, museums, and archives put their metadata and assets on the web in such a way that fabulous new discovery, social, and remixing tools (and the developers who build such tools) will have access to them. What does that mean? That means it’ll be much easier for professionals or even hobbyists to build interfaces and curate collections like Old SF, an amazing local history site built from resources at the San Francisco Public Library. It means that projects like LibraryCloud can ingest your data and make it available through the fascinating social discovery interface called ShelfLife. It means that you can use slick and powerful curatorial tools like extraMUROS to do even simple things, like building slideshows of library and web content for an iPad on the fly. It means a lot of different things, but something that I know will resonate in the under-resourced public libraries that haven’t been able to invest in a lot of in-house tech staff: it means the technically inclined individuals in your community will be able to leverage their own skills to make the library better. And when they make their library better, they make their community better.”
From Nate Hill’s post on the PLA Blog, The DPLA takes off