Digital Public Library of America to debut on April 18, 2013

At very few times in your life do you get to witness something that will literally change the world. This is one of those occasions. 

On April 18-19, 2013, the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) will celebrate the groundbreaking work of hundreds of librarians, innovators, and other dedicated volunteers in a collective effort to build the first national digital library. We are all invited to join them at the Boston Public Library for this historic event.

Quoting from the DPLA website:

The DPLA planning initiative grew out of an October 2010 meeting at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, which brought together over 40 representatives from foundations, research institutions, cultural organizations, government, and libraries to discuss best approaches to building a national digital library. In December 2010, the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, generously supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, convened leading experts in libraries, technology, law, and education to begin work on this problem; a two-year process of intense grassroots community organization, beginning in October 2011 and hosted at the Berkman Center, will result in a realistic and detailed workplan for launching the DPLA, as well as unveiling of a prototype of the system with specially digitized materials. 

The vision of a national digital library has been circulating among librarians, scholars, educators, and private industry representatives since the early 1990s, but it has not yet materialized. Efforts led by a range of organizations, including the Library of Congress, HathiTrust, and the Internet Archive, have successfully built resources that provide books, images, historical records, and audiovisual materials to anyone with Internet access. Many universities, public libraries, and other public-spirited organizations have digitized materials that could be brought together under the frame of the DPLA, but these digital collections often exist in silos. Compounding this problem are disparate technical standards, disorganized and incomplete metadata, and a host of legal issues. No project has yet succeeded in bringing these different viewpoints, experiences, and collections together with leading technical experts and the best of private industry to find solutions to these complex challenges. Users have neither coherent access to these materials nor tools to use them in new and exciting ways, and institutions have no clear blueprint for creating a shared infrastructure to serve the public good. The time is right to launch an ambitious project to realize the great promise of the Internet for the advancement of sharing information and of using technology to enable new knowledge and discoveries in the United States.

I am sure I will be writing more about this later.