This week’s digest looks at the European Union’s Open Data rules, extending the arc of publishing through a preprint service, how New Hampshire’s libraries are busier than ever despite a digital trend, NBC Sport’s digitization of its video library, and Iowa City’s digital library effort.
The following is part of a series that looks at The Digital Public Library of America – the first national effort to aggregate existing records in state and regional digital libraries so that they are searchable from a single portal. It is written by Annie Schutte, a librarian, teacher and consultant for Knight Foundation. Above: Copy of a woodcut showing the completion of the transcontinental railroad, May 10, 1869, at Promontory, Utah. From the Classified Photographs Collection of the Utah State Historical Society.
“Examine an old portrait of George Washington, read a pulp crime story in a “penny dreadful” or page through medieval manuscripts at Harvard from the comfort of home. The Digital Public Library of America, launching April 18, will open collections from libraries and museums across the country to anyone with an Internet connection — for free.”
“The question that has most frequently come up in the course of the two-year planning process for theDigital Public Library of America (DPLA) has been a very simple one: What is it?”
““The DPLA is being created to satisfy a need,” said Robert Darnton, director of the Harvard University library system. “This need is widespread and deep. It is the need to make the cultural heritage of this country available to everyone in the country and, in fact, everyone in the world.””
“A group of private individuals has apparently done what the government and Google have not been able to do: establish a national digital public library. Aptly named the Digital Public Library of America , or DPLA for for short, this library aims to become the national archive of content that is currently tucked away in libraries, museums, and universities around the country, accessible only to those patrons with the means to go to the physical location and who have the permission to access the contents.”
“The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) is a project to make the holdings of America’s research libraries, archives, and museums available to all Americans, and eventually to everyone in the world, online and free of charge. Quoting from Robert Darnton’s article for The New York Review for Books, The National Digital Public Library Is Launched at http://goo.gl/G1Ir6, “Thanks to the Internet and a pervasive if imperfect system of education, we now can realize the dream of Jefferson and Franklin. We have the technological and economic resources to make all the collections of all our libraries accessible to all our fellow citizens—and to everyone everywhere with access to the World Wide Web. That is the mission of the DPLA.”
“It seems the dream for a free, online portal to all the content that is usually stuck in libraries scattered across the country will finally become a reality. The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) will be unveiling its prototype website at the Boston Public Library on April 18 during National Library Week.”
This week’s digest covers a new free library in a Philadelphia train station, an online searchable database of international historical declassified documents, digital technology integration in the classroom, the first sale doctrine applied to a recent case of te reselling of digital goods, and a web exhibit about the art and science of book conservation
“The Digital Public Library of America is a beautiful idea. Take the physical-to-digital ambition of Google Books and wed it to the civic spirit of the US public library system, providing a centralized portal to a decentralized network of digital media from libraries, museums, universities, archives, and other local, regional, and national collections. Framed in this way, it all seems so logical, so proper, so clear — everything the internet as a public commons promised to be. Surely the messy reality of copyright law, limited local budgets, or the cat-herding that goes into any grand alliance of independent institutions was bound to foul it up somewhere.”
