Digital Public Library of America Digital Hubs Pilot

FAIN: HC-50017-12

DPLA (Boston, MA 02116-2813)
Maura Marx (Project Director: July 2012 to May 2013)
John G. Palfrey (Project Director: May 2013 to October 2013)
Daniel J. Cohen (Project Director: October 2013 to May 2017)

Funding details:
Original grant (2012) $1,000,000.00
Supplement (2015) $250,000.00

The incorporation and launch of the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), a groundbreaking project that seeks to digitize and bring together the contents of our nation's libraries and archives, and make them freely available to all online. Project activities to be completed during the grant period will include the creation of four state or regional "service hubs," each responsible for developing a standard set of services to local organizations, and meetings with both service hubs and existing large-scale "content hubs" to formulate content provider agreements.

The DPLA Digital Hubs Pilot will take the first steps to bring together existing United States digital library infrastructure into a sustainable national digital library system. Foundational to the DPLA collection will be the rich historic materials held by archives, public libraries, museums, and historic societies across the country.These materials are important to historians, genealogists, sociologists and scholars of a wide range of humanities disciplines studying every aspect of American life. The goal of the project is twofold: to develop, test and implement the agreements and methods by which existing content hubs -- large scale digital content repositories -- become part of an interconnected national network, and to strengthen local services to institutions and communities and to develop guidelines for sustainable regional digital cooperatives, while enabling hub participation and data ingestion in the DPLA.

Media Coverage

Our Digital Heritage: Bringing local history to life online (Media Coverage)
Author(s): Meredith Farkas
Publication: https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/2016/05/02/libraries-digital-heritage/
Date: 5/2/2016
Abstract: Libraries have always played a role in preserving local history, but that job has become more complex as the formats in which materials may be available continue to multiply. On the other hand, the technologies to digitize and post local history resources online have become cheaper and more readily available, even to small libraries.
URL: https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/2016/05/02/libraries-digital-heritage/

Associated Products