The Digital Public Library of America 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 2.5 years of development.
Overview
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. It was started by Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society in 2010, with financial support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, 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. 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." 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.” 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.
Board of directors
In September, 2012, an inaugural Board of Directors was appointed to guide the DPLA: Cathy Casserly, CEO of Creative Commons; Paul Courant, University Librarian and Dean of Libraries, Harold T. Shapiro Collegiate Professor of Public Policy, Arthur F. Thurnau Professor, Professor of Economics 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 the City and County of San Francisco; and John Palfrey, Head of School, Phillips Academy Andover. In 2015, John Palfrey, the founding chairman of the board, was succeeded by Amy Ryan of the Boston Public Library and Jennifer 8. Lee also joined the board. Daniel J. Cohen was appointed as the founding Executive Director in March 2013.
Critiques of the project during its planning phase included: its vagueness, lack of internal cohesion, potentially redundant overlap with similar efforts, and potential to redirect financial support away from existing public libraries. 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. Some public librarians have also expressed a concern that a national digital library will divert and reduce traditional public library funding, which received a fast response from the DPLA. According to Peggy Rudd, a member of the Steering Committee, "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".
Projects discussed in planning phase
Participants in the planning phase of the DPLA established a publicly accessible wiki which outlines "workstreams" 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. 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. In June 2013, the DPLA announced a partnership with HathiTrust to provide access to the latter's digital materials.
