“From the beginning, one of the potential applications we’d imagined for this suite of tools was the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), a wonderfully ambitious project that aims to create a centralized (yet networked) online repository of our cultural and scientific record. Recently, extraMUROS was selected as one of six projects to be showcased at a national plenary on Oct. 21 where the public can experience the best ideas and models submitted to the DPLA Beta Sprint (an open call for code and concepts defining how the DPLA should operate).
“While books are vital to the future of libraries, we believe that in an increasingly audiovisual world, it is essential that libraries also play a major role in making available innovative tools for interpreting society’s textual and audiovisual past, present and future. 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. Moreover, we feel that these tools and the DPLA in general can be a vital resource for journalists and media-makers of all kinds.”
From Jesse Shapin’s article on PBS’ MediaShift Idea Lab, Zeega Imagines New Forms of Libraries and Archives