The Digital Public Library of America doesn’t exist yet, but it’s closer to becoming a reality.
At an energized meeting held here at the National Archives on Friday, representatives from top cultural institutions and public and research libraries expressed robust support for the proposed library, which would create a portal to allow the public to get easy online access to collections held at many different institutions.
Two foundations said they would together give $5-million in grant money to help get it up and running by April 2013. A major European digital library announced it will work with its planned American counterpart to make their technical structures compatible. And nine technology teams showcased online frameworks they built for a “beta sprint” contest to develop ideas for the technical framework the library will require.
But organizers and observers made it clear that there’s still a long way to go before the digital public library goes online, and that its final shape—and just how public it will really be—remain up in the air.
It’s been a year since plans for the library began to take shape in a serious way. David S. Ferriero, archivist of the United States, gave the audience an overview of the Archives’ holdings and said he had an ulterior motive for being a booster of the digital public library, known as DPLA. Many of the Archives’ holdings aren’t easy for the public to find—a problem shared by many other institutions. “My reason for being so passionate about the DPLA is that I want every stinking piece of this collection digitized,” Mr. Ferriero said. “I want it available to the world 24 hours a day.”
Incubation at Harvard
Robert Darnton, the university librarian at Harvard University and a well-known historian, has been one of the strongest public voices in support of the idea, publishing calls-to-action in high-visibility venues such as the The New York Review of Books.
Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society became the incubator for the actual planning work; it set up a wiki and listserv and organized working groups, each in charge of a specific work stream, such as governance, audience, technical aspects, and copyright issues. John Palfrey, a professor of law at Harvard and the faculty co-director of the Berkman Center, chairs the steering committee that coordinates the work.
Financial support has come from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and other donors. At the meeting last week, the foundation announced it would contribute $2.5-million more to help build the library. The Britain-based Arcadia Fund also pledged $2.5-million, and Mr. Palfrey said that an additional $1-million had been pledged by private donors.
The money from Sloan and from Arcadia will support two years of intense grass-roots work “to build a realistic and detailed work plan” for the library, including the development of a functional technical prototype, says an announcement about the grants.
At the meeting, representatives of the Library of Congress, the National Archives, and the Smithsonian, as well as the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services, made a strong showing of public support for the project.
Also on hand was Jill Cousins, the executive director of Europeana, an online portal that gives access to millions of digitized objects from European collections. She announced the partnership between her group and the DPLA organizers to make their technical systems interoperable. If they succeed, it will expand both projects’ ability to connect users with vast amounts of digital material.
The partnership makes sense because the two enterprises share a common goal “to make the riches available to everyone,” said Ms. Cousins. “At Europeana, we have done some of the things that you are starting. I’d like DPLA certainly not to reinvent the wheel but to move the cart forward.”
‘I’m Going to DPLA It!’
Peggy D. Rudd, director and librarian of the Texas State Library and Archives Commission, reminded the audience that not everybody was well equipped to clamber aboard. “So many of us have been focusing on content,” she said. “We must remember that there are those in our country that will need a whole variety of assistance to use this resource that we’re all committed to today.” Good tools and access to them will be critical to making the digital public library useful to large numbers of people, she said. If the project succeeds, she suggested, “DPLA” could become a verb. Ms. Rudd imagined someone walking down the sidewalk with a smartphone and deciding to look something up, saying “I’m going to DPLA it!”
As her comments about usability suggested, the “public” aspect of the enterprise may be the hardest to make a reality. Much of the impetus behind the project has come from the academic world and from institutions such as the Library of Congress. But the DPLA steering committee now includes several public librarians, including Carla Hayden, chief executive of the Enoch Pratt Free Library, in Baltimore; Luis Herrera, city librarian for the City and County of San Francisco; Dwight McInvaill, director of the Georgetown County Library, in South Carolina; and Amy E. Ryan, president of the Boston Public Library.
“We continue to work very hard to ensure that this process is one that’s evenly balanced between the interests of public libraries and academic libraries as well as government-based libraries,” Mr. Palfrey said in an interview after the meeting
The word “library” might not be the best term for the DPLA, according to Mr. Palfrey. “At least from my perspective, ‘platform’ is probably the right word,” he told The Chronicle. “Ultimately this should be a support system for all kinds of libraries to provide services to their communities.”
Tech Tools
How the digital public library might provide those services became a little clearer during the beta-sprint software presentations. A group from the National Technical University of Athens showed how their Metadata Interoperability Services, or MINT, can pull together metadata associated with diverse online collections.
The National Archives, the Library of Congress, and the Smithsonian demonstrated a search tool that can work across the three institutions’ holdings. The Harvard Library Innovation Laboratory and several partners unveiled ShelfLife, which got an enthusiastic response from the crowd with visual representations that use the image of bookshelves to present search results. The application also captures social activity surrounding specific items, letting users share information about particular works.
David Weinberger, a technologist who is a senior researcher at the Berkman Center, made the ShelfLife presentation. The real opportunity for the digital public library “is not simply to connect people to works,” he said, but “to connect people to people through works.” Mr. Weinberger picked up on the theme of getting different systems and collections to mesh, and got a laugh when he told the audience that “my head and heart are exploding with the desire to interoperate.”
Doron Weber, vice president for programs at the Sloan foundation, laid out some of the challenges ahead in an interview. “There’s a massive amount of physical, logistical meetings that have to take place in the next 18 months,” he said. It will be essential to get firm commitments from institutions about what they’re willing to make part of the library. “Right now we have phenomenal support from most of the institutions in the country,” he said. “I think it’s always hard when you have to get very specific about what collections are in and what collections are out.”
Building Alliances
Mr. Weber pointed out that copyright remains a huge potential obstacle, although there are enormous amounts of public-domain material to work with already. He hopes that other foundations may join the effort, and that commercial entities might become allies as well. “We want Microsoft, we want Google, we want Amazon,” he said. The library organizers have been talking with Google and have discussed meeting with publishers to see what their involvement might be. As Mr. Weber put it, “I think everyone is waiting to see what the “it” is.”
Despite such uncertainties, a sense of confidence that the cart really is moving forward drove the meeting and gave it the feel of a watershed moment. Jerome McGann, a professor of English at the University of Virginia and a member of the steering committee, told a reporter he was convinced now that the library would become a reality, and that it creates a chance “to reignite the American Enlightenment.”
Big dreams and optimism were the order of the day. “If we can put a man on the moon, why can’t we launch the Library of Congress into cyberspace?” asked Carl Malamud, president of Public.Resource.Org and another member of the steering committee. (One of two graphic artists who were sketching out highlights of the discussion on whiteboards incorporated an astronaut into her rendering after Mr. Malamud spoke.)
Mr. Malamud spoke at a session that offered perspectives on the project from various vantage points. He said that in our cultural institutions, “there is a tremendous reservoir of knowledge locked up, waiting to be tapped.” Instead of “creating yet another institution,” the digital library ought to be “that common reservoir that all could tap into.”
Amanda French, THATCamp coordinator at George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media, spoke at the same session. She used the idea of an aubade—a poem about lovers parting at morning—to explore how the love of libraries would carry over to the digital public library under construction. Ms. French argued for a physical as well as an online presence for the project. “I want a building. A public building, not a data center, not a warehouse,” she told the plenary audience. “I do not need a building, but I want it with the irrational desire of a lover.” It could, she said, be “a monument to the ideal of an informed citizenry, a culturally, intellectually, and emotionally enriched citizenry.”
Ms. French’s larger point was that the proposed library should be more than just a Web site. “A site that merely aggregates existing content without providing such services would seem to me like a Galatea, a lovely statue with no humanity other than what we project upon it,” she said.
