Formal launch of the Digital Public Library postponed -- Website still to go on

From a press release on the Digital Public Library of America website:

From all of us at the Digital Public Library of America, our hearts go out to those affected by the terrible events in Boston yesterday. 

The tragedy took place right in front of the Boston Public Library, where we planned to have our gala launch on Thursday. I have been in touch with Amy Ryan, the President of the BPL, and I extended our sympathies to the BPL staff and their loved ones. 

We have all been looking forward to this week’s festivities, to celebrate how thousands of people and institutions have come together to build the DPLA, to thank our incredibly generous contributors and funders, and to mark the DPLA’s transition from vision to reality.

The website is still scheduled to be opened to the public on 18 April 2013. From another announcement:

The Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is joining with the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) to provide online access to thousands of historical materials archived at Illinois. As part of the cooperative partnership, the University Library will contribute metadata for 15 of its digital image collections. 

Premier collections include the Motley Collection of Theatre and Costume Design (costume and set designs by the Motley Group, whose designs were used in productions on Broadway and the Metropolitan Opera in New York City); Portraits of Actors, 1720-1920 (includes almost 3,500 pictures of actors-studio portraits, the majority are British and American actors who worked between about 1770 and 1893); Historical Maps Online (maps charting the last 400 years of historical development in Illinois and the Northwest Territory); and Sousa Archives Music Instrument Digital Image Library (images of rare cornets and trumpets, early boxwood clarinets and flutes, unique double-reed sarrusophones, bassoons and Heckelphone, unusual harps and zithers, prototype electronic Hawaiian guitars and Sal Mar Construction, and Civil War era military horns in the Sousa Archives and Center for American Music). 

Significant to the genealogical community are the inclusion of the historic online maps.