Ministry of Innovation —

Digital Public Library of America to add millions of records to its archive

At one year old, DPLA makes some big partnerships and looks back on its growth.

Aquarium, Battery Park, New York City [Postcard], ca. 1931. This is just one of the many resources you can find online through the DPLA website or through apps using its API.

Today marks the Digital Public Library of America's one-year anniversary. To celebrate the occasion, the non-profit library network announced six new partnerships with major archives, including the US Government Printing Office and the J. Paul Getty Trust.

The DPLA is best described as a platform that connects the online archives of many libraries around the nation into a single network. You can search all of these archives through the digital library's website, and developers can build apps around the DPLA's metadata collection using the publicly available API.

It's easy to find historical documents, public domain works, and vintage photos online through a search on the DPLA's website. "To participate in the DPLA, all institutions have to donate their metadata under a CC0 license, send us a thumbnail, and host a publicly viewable full version of the item," DPLA Executive Director Dan Cohen told Ars.

The fledgling library said today that one of its early partners, the New York Public Library, agreed to expand access to its digital collections in the coming year. It will increase from the initial 14,000 digitized items it lent the DPLA catalog to over 1 million such records.

In addition, the DPLA announced partnerships with the California Digital Library, the Connecticut Digital Archive, the J. Paul Getty Trust, the US Government Printing Office, Indiana Memory, and the Montana Memory Project.

One could argue that the DPLA's most important partnership is with the US Government Printing Office, which will provide access to a “growing collection” of government documents through the DPLA. “Examples include: the Federal Budget, laws such as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, Federal regulations and Congressional hearings, reports and documents,” a DPLA press release notes.

1906 Firecart in Parade, Murray City, Utah.
1906 Firecart in Parade, Murray City, Utah.

Making good on 2013's promises

Back when Ars spoke to Cohen in 2013, he talked about some of his plans for the digital library, calling it a “multi-decade effort.” In its first year, one of the DPLA's most important goals has been to catalog and connect to as many digital works as possible. Ars caught up with Cohen again this year, and he told us that the organization has made it a priority to help public libraries digitize their works using a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to advocate for putting resources online. “We are helping to train public librarians with the digital skills they will need for the twenty-first century and to participate in a large-scale digital project like DPLA,” Cohen wrote in an e-mail.

Cohen also told Ars last year that he hoped to increase the number of contemporary books to which the DPLA could direct its visitors. Given the state of copyright law in America, that's a tall order for a nascent non-profit, but the members of the DPLA have been mulling either supporting or creating an alternative form of licensing for authors who want to use it for years now (Creative Commons and Library License were discussed last year as potential standards to adopt). One year later, though, licensing is still a thorny issue at the DPLA. “We have continued to think about how to expand the realm of openly available e-books and indeed have made significant progress on this behind the scenes over the last year by talking to individuals and organizations interested in making [it a] common cause,” Cohen told Ars. He added that the DPLA would “have some announcements on this front in the near future.”

The DPLA received over $2 million in grants and donations in its first year. It says that it has amassed more than seven million digitized items in its archives to date, and last year it attracted more than one million unique hits to its website. But the more impressive numbers come from the fact that the digital library made its metadata available to anyone. It reported today that over the year it received nine million hits to its API.

Some of the apps that developers have made with the database include “a smartphone app called OpenPics that shows materials from DPLA related to the location where you are standing; a Pinterest-style app called Culture Collage that shows thumbnails of images related to a particular search on an endlessly scrolling page; and an app called FindDPLA that helps Wikipedia editors locate helpful primary sources to cite in their articles.” With third-party apps, the DPLA isn't just a public library, it lets anyone build their own public library to suit their needs.

Update: Ars originally wrote that an institution could merely contribute metadata to the DPLA project, but the project requires than an institution actually make the full version of the item view-able.

8 Reader Comments

  1. WorldCat - The World's Largest Library Catalog

    WorldCat connects you to the collections and services of more than 10,000 libraries worldwide
    50 posts | registered
  2. 1906 Firecart pulled by the ancestors of ZZ Top.

    Anyway I wonder if this will run into competition with digital libraries run by corporations like Overdrive?

    Last edited by Ostracus on Fri Apr 18, 2014 9:01 am

    27188 posts | registered
  3. A truly inspiring image of our nation's historic facial hair.
    169 posts | registered
  4. This is totally awesome. I have a personal project that requires a number of books from the 1800s. This paired with google books is a great starting point to get a good root collections going.
    13 posts | registered
  5. Sounds like a great idea, and it should work very well for items in the public domain. Licensing and copyright are still a clusterfark though. There needs to be a legal compulsory licensing system in place for digital works for libraries. For example a library could purchase one copy of an E-Book and then 'lend' it an unlimited number of times to an unlimited number of people concurrently.
    1697 posts | registered
  6. These articles don't really tell enough. I've bookmarked" the site. Yeah. Being a library,and a digital one at that, what is the type of system that items are archived . A to Z . # to number ? Given future digital entries will only grow and mankinds history is somewhat valued at 10,000 years - this leaves out most of the southern hemishere.
    Given an archival system is merely based on a digital search engine. Doesn't say a lot about just browsing a row or two of similiar subjects,topics,or titles. Will be a monumental task of assuring digital information remains non-corrupted. And as well continung to hold rare /older stuff in an organized accountable way.
    Could probably find some old building plans,and maybe look at the way early constructions were done. The farther back you get,the more rare instruction type manuals would be. Rare stuff will remain,to be more and more difficult to reference. Given the stand out difference between the dwarfing digital information spectrum,and the 'ye ole printing press'.
    A mere search engine doesn't give such a collection its due honors.
    715 posts | registered
  7. The link to the original picture of the fire cart is broken. "Digital image copyright 2003" is little help. It looks like a modern picture of three guys with (fake?) beards pulling an antique. The guy on the right appears to be wearing athletic shoes. The sunglasses look like post-WWII designs, Wayfarers or something similar.

    I am big on digital preservation and dp.la, but more metadata will help prevent future people from making false historical connections.
    52 posts | registered
  8. Pinkerton wrote:
    The link to the original picture of the fire cart is broken. "Digital image copyright 2003" is little help. It looks like a modern picture of three guys with (fake?) beards pulling an antique. The guy on the right appears to be wearing athletic shoes. The sunglasses look like post-WWII designs, Wayfarers or something similar.

    I am big on digital preservation and dp.la, but more metadata will help prevent future people from making false historical connections.


    It does note that it is a 1906 fire cart being pulled, and not a fire cart being pulled in 1906. Following the DPLA link to MWDL shows that the date of the photograph is unknown... Let us hope future people don't assume something the photograph doesn't stipulate in its data as accurate, especially if the same future people start to examine drone photographs and concludes them to be aliens. It will be like an Aztec UFO hieroglyph "conspiracy" except the photographs will be still images from The Empire Strikes Back.
    49 posts | registered

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