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.

Megan Geuss – Apr 18, 2014 5:00 am | 8

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. Credit: New York Aquarium Postcards collection of the Wildlife Conservation Society Archives. Via Empire State Digital Network.

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It’s easy to find historical documents, public domain works, and vintage photos online through a search on the DPLA’s website.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. Credit: Murray (UT) Museum via Mountain West Digital Library.

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.