“For several years, Martin Gomez has been actively promoting the Digital Public Library of America – a campaign to digitize inventories of cultural and scientific records and make them available to everyone, online – in effect, creating the public library of the future. Until this month, he served as general manager of Los Angeles’ public library system, overseeing 72 branches, 1,100 employees, and an annual budget of $129-million. He resigned recently to take a new job as vice-dean of libraries at the University of Southern California. Mr. Gomez was in Toronto this week to appear at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto. Before his address, he spoke to the Globe and Mail’s Michael Posner.
“Globe and Mail: When you talk about creating a digital public library, what exactly do you mean?
“Gomez: A whole universe of information has been digitized. We are not too far, in the near future, from being able to connect a lot of the content that’s been created, or is being created, by libraries in the United States, and eventually across the world – content that students, scholars and the general public could easily access. The Digital Public Library of America [DPLA] is trying to create that infrastructure.”
From Michael Posner’s interview with Martin Gomez in the Globe and Mail, Creating the public library of the future