Aggregation is hard, yo.

With DPLAfest 2016 larger than ever, we reached out to a few attendees ahead of the event to help us capture the (many) diverse experiences of fest participants.  These ‘special correspondents’ have graciously volunteered to share their personal perspectives on the fest.  In this first of two guest posts by our special correspondents, Sara Stephenson, Kerry Dunne, and Emily Pfotenhauer reflect on their fest experiences from the perspectives of their fields and interests: education, ebooks, and the growing DPLA hub network.

There's an encouraging bright spot in the 'digital divide.'

Is a universal library finally within reach?

In brief, this three-way partnership between the New York Public Library (NYPL), DPLA, and First Book (with support from the Institute of Museum and Library Services) seeks to make free ebooks accessible to low-income children between the ages of 0 and 18. The books will be made available through the NYPL Library Simplified app (available in … Continue reading The Open Ebooks Initiative →

IMLS (Institute of Museum and Library Services) announced recently that it is funding a $2 million grant for three partners (Digital Public Library of America, Stanford University, and DuraSpace) to develop repository solutions, hosting strategies, and methods for the exchange of information for digital library collections. The project will give libraries, museums, and archives of all types and sizes an out-of-the-box open source solution for managing their digital content and exposing what they have to the world. It will build on the work many academic libraries have done to create institutional repositories for their own organizations.

An eight-year-old girl in Massachusetts falls love with the American Girl series of books. She begs, begs, begs for more of them. She doesn’t just discover paper books and e-books through the publi…

Harvard University's Robert Darnton, a strong advocate for open access, updates the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA).

In the scramble to gain market share in cyberspace, something is getting lost: the public interest. Libraries and laboratories—crucial nodes of the World Wide Web—are buckling under economic pressure, and the information they diffuse is being diverted away from the public sphere, where it can do most good. Not that information comes free or “wants to be free,” as Internet enthusiasts proclaimed twenty years ago. It comes filtered through expensive technologies and financed by powerful corporations.

When it was first proposed, the Digital Public Library of America—a visionary project that aims to make discoverable and accessible online the gems of local library collections nationwide—drew many questions.

Editor’s note: This is Part One of Duncan's LibraryCity series on the Digital Public Library of America and public libraries. Part Two is here. Related: Why the DPLA should focus on…

Good exemplar of public-library beefs with DPLA.

Today the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) announced that the HathiTrust Digital Library will partner with DPLA to expand discovery and use of HathiTrust’s public domain and other openly available content. DPLA provides an online portal to freely available digital material held by libraries, archives, and museums across the United States. The HathiTrust Digital Library offers a collection of millions of titles digitized from academic and research institutions around the world. The new partnership doubles the size of the DPLA collection and provides a wider audience for the HathiTrust titles...