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The Digital Public Library of America: Harnessing the Reigns of Technology

TMCnet Feature

April 22, 2014

The Digital Public Library of America: Harnessing the Reigns of Technology

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By Lavanya Rathnam
TMCnet Contributing Writer

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) is an ambitious project to harness the power of technology.   It gives users access to digital collections and archives of various U.S. libraries. It was launched on April 18, 2013 by Harvard University's Berkman Society for Internet and Society. Conceived in 2010, and took two and a half years to build the project with funding from Alfred Sloan Foundation, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the US National Endowment for Humanities.


The aim of DPLA is to create an open network of online resources from various libraries and universities in the US to educate and empower the current and future generations. It operates on a network model, much like the Internet itself. The DPLA consists of different hubs located across the nation, and these hubs connect with each other to give users centralized access to the resources from all the different hubs. When DPLA started its operations in 2013, it had seven hubs across the US, namely, the Mountain West Digital Library comprising of archives from the states of Utah, Nevada and Arizona, the Digital Commonwealth library of Massachusetts, the Digital Library of Georgia, Kentucky Digital Library, Minnesota Digital Library, South Carolina Digital Library and Oregon Digital Library.

Recently, it connected with other libraries such as the California Digital Library, the Connecticut Digital Archive, Paul Getty Trust, Montana Memory Project, Indiana Memory Project and the U.S. Government Printing Office. Out of these different organizations, its partnership with the U.S. Government Printing Office is likely to give DPLA a big boost as it can now have access to different government documents such as legislation, federal regulations and Congressional hearings. Furthermore, one of DPLA's initial partners, the New York Public Library, agreed to expand access to more than one million records from the current 14,000. All these partnerships are contributing to the growing success of the DPLA.

More importantly, users are now more empowered than before because they are able to access enormous amounts of information from a single place. This is the true power of technology!




Edited by Maurice Nagle


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