 | This article needs to be updated.(May 2020) |
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| Abbreviation | DPLA |
|---|---|
| Founded | April 18, 2013 |
| Type | Nonprofit |
| 46-1160948 | |
| Legal status | 501(c)(3) project |
| Headquarters | Boston, Massachusetts, US |
Executive director | John Bracken |
| Website | dp |
The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) is a US project aimed at providing public access to digital holdings in order to create a large-scale public digital library. It officially launched on April 18, 2013, after two-and-a-half years of development. [1]
The DPLA is a discovery tool, or union catalog, for public domain and openly licensed content held by the United States' archives, libraries, museums, and other cultural heritage institutions. [1] It was started by Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society in 2010, with financial support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, [2] and has subsequently received funding from several foundations and government agencies, including the US National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. [3] It "aims to unify such disparate sources as the Library of Congress, the Internet Archive, various academic collections, and presumably any other collection that would be meaningful to include. ... They have yet to ... decide such issues as how near to the present their catalog will come. There is an ongoing dispute regarding so-called 'orphan works' and other questions of copyright." [4] [ needs update ] John Palfrey, co-director of the Berkman Center, stated in 2011: "We aspire to establish a system whereby all Americans can gain access to information and knowledge in digital formats in a manner that is 'free to all.' It is by no means a plan to replace libraries, but rather to create a common resource for libraries and patrons of all types.” [5]
The DPLA links service hubs, including twelve major state and regional digital libraries or library collaborations, as well as sixteen content hubs that maintain a one-to-one relationship with DPLA. [6] [7]
In July 2023, in response to the considerable number of books banned or challenged in the United States, the DPLA launched The Banned Book Club. [8] The online resource allows readers to check out books banned by local libraries. The service uses GPS to determine a user's location and allows them to freely access the exact books that have been banned in their local area. [9] John S. Bracken, the executive director of the DPLA, said they created The Banned Book Club to ensure every American has access to books they want to read: "Today book bans are one of the greatest threats to our freedom". [10]
In September 2012, an inaugural Board of Directors was appointed to guide the DPLA: Cathy Casserly, CEO of Creative Commons; Paul Courant, Dean of Libraries and Professor of Information at the University of Michigan; Laura DeBonis, Former Director of Library Partnerships for Google Book Search; Luis Herrera, City Librarian for San Francisco; and John Palfrey, Head of School at Phillips Academy Andover, who served as board chairman. [11] In 2015, Palfrey was succeeded as chairman by Amy Ryan of the Boston Public Library and Jennifer 8. Lee became a board member. [12]
Daniel J. Cohen was appointed as the founding Executive Director in March 2013. [13]
A steering committee led the planning phase of the DPLA initiative from inception through its launch in 2013. Members of the project's Steering Committee included Harvard University's Robert Darnton, Maura Marx, and John Palfrey; Paul Courant of University of Michigan, Carla Hayden then of Baltimore's Enoch Pratt Free Library and subsequently the Librarian of Congress, Charles J. Henry of the US Council on Library and Information Resources, Luis Herrera of San Francisco Public Library, Susan Hildreth of the US government Institute of Museum and Library Services (who stepped down from the Steering Committee to avoid a conflict of interest related to funding from IMLS), Brewster Kahle, Michael A. Keller of Stanford University, Carl Malamud, consultant Deanna B. Marcum, Jerome McGann, Dwight McInvaill of Georgetown County Library in South Carolina, Peggy Rudd of the Texas State Library and Archives Commission, Amy Ryan of the Boston Public Library, David Spadafora of the Newberry Library in Chicago, and Doron Weber of the Sloan Foundation. [14] Others working on the project included Harvard University's David Weinberger. [15]
Critiques of the project during its planning phase included its vagueness, lack of internal cohesion, potentially redundant overlap with similar efforts (such as Project Gutenberg), and potential to redirect financial support away from existing public libraries. [16] It has been suggested that in contrast to the brick-and-mortar public library, a digital public library may not be suitable for providing adult literacy training or fostering young children's cognitive development. [17]
Concern that the project would harm funding for traditional public libraries was acknowledged in the statement of Peggy Rudd, a member of the Steering Committee, that "the Chief Officers of State Library Agencies passed a resolution at their May 11, 2011 meeting asking the steering committee to reconsider the name Digital Public Library of America, fearing that the inclusion of the word 'public' would have the unintended consequence of giving local governments the excuse to reduce public library funding". [18]
Participants in the planning phase of the DPLA established a publicly accessible wiki [19] which outlines "workstreams" ("Audience and Participation", "Content and Scope", "Financial/Business Models", "Governance", "Legal Issues," "Technical Aspects") and corresponding listserves. A proposed future project of the DPLA is the idea of the Scannebago, a mobile scanning unit that would travel the United States in order to digitize and curate local historical materials. [20] Harvard University staff, led by project's managing director Maura Marx and principal investigator John Palfrey, coordinated a broad-based team that built the DPLA's digital library platform, which launched on April 18, 2013. [21]
In June 2013, the DPLA announced a partnership with HathiTrust to provide access to the latter's digital materials. [22]
The Internet Archive is an American digital library founded on May 10, 1996, and chaired by free information advocate Brewster Kahle. It provides free access to collections of digitized materials like websites, software applications, music, audiovisual and print materials. The Archive is also an activist organization, advocating a free and open Internet. As of January 1, 2023, the Internet Archive holds more than 39 million print materials, 11.6 million pieces of audiovisual content, 2.6 million software programs, 15 million audio files, 4.7 million images, 251,000 concerts and over 828 billion web pages in its Wayback Machine. Their mission is to provide "universal access to all knowledge."
Jonathan L. Zittrain is an American professor of Internet law and the George Bemis Professor of International Law at Harvard Law School. He is also a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, a professor of computer science at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and co-founder and director of Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. Previously, Zittrain was Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute of the University of Oxford and visiting professor at the New York University School of Law and Stanford Law School. He is the author of The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It as well as co-editor of the books, Access Denied, Access Controlled, and Access Contested.
JSTOR is a digital library founded in 1994. Originally containing digitized back issues of academic journals, it now encompasses books and other primary sources as well as current issues of journals in the humanities and social sciences. It provides full-text searches of almost 2,000 journals. Most access is by subscription but some of the site is public domain, and open access content is available free of charge.
The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society is a research center at Harvard University that focuses on the study of cyberspace. Founded at Harvard Law School, the center traditionally focused on internet-related legal issues. On May 15, 2008, the center was elevated to an interfaculty initiative of Harvard University as a whole. It is named after the Berkman family. On July 5, 2016, the center added "Klein" to its name following a gift of $15 million from Michael R. Klein.
Harvard Library is the network of Harvard University's libraries and services. It is the oldest library system in the United States and both the largest academic library and largest private library in the world. Its collection holds over 20 million volumes, 400 million manuscripts, 10 million photographs, and one million maps.
Artstor is a nonprofit organization that builds and distributes the Digital Library, an online resource of more than 2.5 million images in the arts, architecture, humanities, and sciences, and Shared Shelf, a Web-based cataloging and image management software service that allows institutions to catalog, edit, store, and share local collections.
John Gorham Palfrey VII is an American educator, scholar, and law professor. He is an authority on the legal aspects of emerging media and an advocate for Internet freedom, including increased online transparency and accountability as well as child safety. In March 2019, he was named the president of the MacArthur Foundation effective September 1, 2019. Palfrey was the 15th Head of School at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts from 2012 to 2019. He has been an important figure at Harvard Law School and served as executive director of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society from 2002 to 2008.
The Open Content Alliance (OCA) was a consortium of organizations contributing to a permanent, publicly accessible archive of digitized texts. Its creation was announced in October 2005 by Yahoo!, the Internet Archive, the University of California, the University of Toronto and others. Scanning for the Open Content Alliance was administered by the Internet Archive, which also provided permanent storage and access through its website.
Google Books is a service from Google that searches the full text of books and magazines that Google has scanned, converted to text using optical character recognition (OCR), and stored in its digital database. Books are provided either by publishers and authors through the Google Books Partner Program, or by Google's library partners through the Library Project. Additionally, Google has partnered with a number of magazine publishers to digitize their archives.
The OpenNet Initiative (ONI) was a joint project whose goal was to monitor and report on internet filtering and surveillance practices by nations. The project employed a number of technical means, as well as an international network of investigators, to determine the extent and nature of government-run internet filtering programs. Participating academic institutions included the Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto; Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School; the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) at University of Oxford; and, The SecDev Group, which took over from the Advanced Network Research Group at the Cambridge Security Programme, University of Cambridge.
Ethan Zuckerman is an American media scholar, blogger, and Internet activist. He was the director of the MIT Center for Civic Media, and Associate Professor of the Practice in Media Arts and Sciences at MIT until May 2020, and the author of the 2013 book Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection, which won the Zócalo Book Prize. In 2020, he became an associate professor of public policy, communication and information at the University of Massachusetts.
Sidney Verba was an American political scientist, librarian and library administrator. His academic interests were mainly American and comparative politics. He was the Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor at Harvard University and also served Harvard as the director of the Harvard University Library from 1984 to 2007.
Paul N. Courant is an American economist who is an expert in public goods. His recent research focuses on the economics of universities, the economics of libraries and archives, and the impact of new information technologies on the scholarly publishing system.
Chronicling America is an open access, open source newspaper database and companion website. It is produced by the United States National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP), a partnership between the Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities. The NDNP was founded in 2005. The Chronicling America website was publicly launched in March 2007. It is hosted by the Library of Congress. Much of the content hosted on Chronicling America is in the public domain.
HathiTrust Digital Library is a large-scale collaborative repository of digital content from research libraries including content digitized via Google Books and the Internet Archive digitization initiatives, as well as content digitized locally by libraries.
A digital library, also called an online library, an internet library, a digital repository, a library without walls, or a digital collection is an online database of digital objects that can include text, still images, audio, video, digital documents, or other digital media formats or a library accessible through the internet. Objects can consist of digitized content like print or photographs, as well as originally produced digital content like word processor files or social media posts. In addition to storing content, digital libraries provide means for organizing, searching, and retrieving the content contained in the collection. Digital libraries can vary immensely in size and scope, and can be maintained by individuals or organizations. The digital content may be stored locally, or accessed remotely via computer networks. These information retrieval systems are able to exchange information with each other through interoperability and sustainability.
David Weinberger is an American author, technologist, and speaker. Trained as a philosopher, Weinberger's work focuses on how technology — particularly the internet and machine learning — is changing our ideas, with books about the effect of machine learning’s complex models on business strategy and sense of meaning; order and organization in the digital age; the networking of knowledge; the Net's effect on core concepts of self and place; and the shifts in relationships between businesses and their markets.
The Scannebago concept can be attributed to Emily Gore, currently the Director for Content for the Digital Public Library of America. The premise behind the "Scannebago" is to work with donors and other funders to create a group of mobile scan centers that would enable the digitization of collections from small, local cultural heritage institutions that may not otherwise have access to these services.
Daniel J. Cohen is an American historian. As of 1 June 2017 he is serving as dean of libraries and vice provost for information collaboration at Northeastern University. He was the Founding Executive Director of the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). He was the director of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media for 12 years, until leaving his position for the DPLA in 2013. His research work has focused around digital history and abstract mathematics being used in Victorian society to explain spirituality. In 2012 he was named one of the Chronicle for Higher Educations Tech Innovators.
The Mountain West Digital Library (MWDL) is a centralized discovery portal for digital resources from libraries, archives, museums, government agencies, and historical societies in the Mountain West region of the United States. MWDL aggregates metadata from these memory institutions and provides online access to their cultural heritage and scholarly resources at http://mwdl.org. The MWDL provides services to a widespread digital library community and serves as the regional service hub to the Digital Public Library of America for Utah, Nevada, Idaho, Arizona, Montana, and Hawaii.
These are not the clientele for the DPLA
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