“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.”
“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.”
“The beginnings of the first public, national, on-line library will soon be unveiled in Boston – home to the country’s first publicly supported municipal library.”
“The Digital Public Library of America, to be launched on April 18, 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. How is that possible? In order to answer that question, I would like to describe the first steps and immediate future of the DPLA. But before going into detail, I think it important to stand back and take a broad view of how such an ambitious undertaking fits into the development of what we commonly call an information society.”
“In another single-topic Digital Campus, we react to the news that Dan is headed to the Digital Public Library of America as its Executive Director (no tears, no tears) by forcing him to tell us all about it. Special guests on the podcast include Berkman Center and DPLA Technical Workstream member David Weinberger, author of Too Big to Know and Everything is Miscellaneous as well as Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows and The Big Switch. Issues raised include Internet centralization, the future of public libraries, and Mr. Potato Head.”
