Update on the Digital Public Library of America

 

From time to time in the past, I have written about the Digital Public Library of America. As you can see from this screenshot, the DPLA now has well over 44 million images, texts, videos, and sounds from across the United States. If you visit the website, you will also see this link:

As you can see, there is clearly a link for Family Research. As genealogists, most of us get in a rut looking at the same online database programs. We can all benefit from realizing that libraries, archives, and other similar institutions collect genealogically valuable documents and records. By expanding into millions of documents and records, the Digital Public Library of America has managed to acquire some very useful genealogical resources. Yes, you do have to search for them but the search is worth it. Here is a long list of the DPLA partner institutions.

Some of these appear to be directly helpful for genealogical research and all of them may contain surprises. All of the documents on the DPLA are usable. Here is the copyright explanation from the website. 

What’s the deal with copyright and a DPLA item?

The copyright status of items in DPLA varies. DPLA links to a wide variety of different materials: many are in the public domain, while others are under rights restrictions but nonetheless publicly viewable. For individual rights information about an item, please check the “Rights” field in the metadata, or follow the link to the digital object on the content provider’s website for more information.

You might want to add a search in the DPLA to your research methodology.