Author: Gil Press / Source: Forbes
The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) went live a few hours ago. It’s the culmination of the work, over the last couple of years, of thousands of people and institutions. But it’s just the beginning. Starting with over two million items, each with its own special story and significance, the Digital Public Library of America will continue to assemble items from America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and connect them with the public.
“We’ve had this great tradition in this country of thousands of public libraries,” Dan Cohen, the DPLA’s Founding Executive Director told me, “and it’s an important part of our democracy that you can walk into a public library and pull a book off the shelf. We want to find ways to continue that tradition. In the digital age, because of piracy, the inclination has been to lock content down. We want to find a culturally and intellectually healthy mid-point—we think it’s important for a healthy society to also have modes of free access to materials and research.”
The new library has three dimensions:
It’s a portal, a free and virtual entry-way to America’s digitized cultural heritage, and an online catalog, organizing the digital collections by time, location, format, and topic.
It’s a platform for application developers to build tools for access and discovery, sharing and creating, learning and teaching.
It’s a community for advocating free, public access in the face of increasingly restrictive digital options.
“We launched today with 2 million…
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