Join DPLA on Monday, July 8 at 2 PM ET for an Open Board + Community Meeting. We will be joined by Benjamin Lee of the University of Washington’s Information School and Meaghan O’Connor of DC Public Library for a conversation on what we’ve heard through a series of conversations this spring with library leaders […]

DPLA is in San Diego this week for the 2024 ALA Annual Conference and Exhibition. Here is where you can find us.

DPLA will be at the ALA Annual Conference in San Diego later this month and we hope to see you there.

Read the latest on our search for a new home for our cultural heritage work and meet our amazing steering committee.

Our award-winning Banned Book Club will continue to highlight brilliant and beautiful works being taken off library shelves Last July, DPLA launched the Banned Book Club to ensure that all readers have access to the books they want to read. The Banned Book Club allows readers in communities directly affected by book bans to access […]

On the heels of our highly successful reparative description workshop series, brought to you by the Metadata and Rights Statements working groups, the Outreach & Assessment Working Group is proud to announce Resourcefully Assessing: Critical Approaches to Assessment, an event series focused on various assessment frameworks and tools used in education, digital collections, and cultural heritage […]

In Spring 2024, DPLA’s Metadata Working Group and Rights Statements Working Group produced Practical Approaches to Reparative Description, a workshop series designed for people working with cultural heritage data looking to deepen their understanding and practice of reparative description. Reparative description focuses on remediating or contextualizing potentially outdated or harmful language used in descriptive practices, […]

Last month, DPLA began a search to select a vibrant and durable home for our flagship cultural heritage aggregation program. Our deadline for the first round of expressions of interest was Tuesday, and we are so appreciative of and encouraged by the responses we received. We are grateful for everyone who has reached out to […]

DPLA held its most recent quarterly Open Board + Community Meeting this Monday, April 22. If you missed the meeting, we invite you to watch the recording to more about the ongoing process to identify a sustainable home for DPLA’s cultural heritage program. We also provided updates on our core work, including our cultural heritage […]

The history of book bans is the history of the fight for power. We know that, time and again, book bans seek to specifically and disproportionately silence black, brown and LGBTQIA+ authors and stories. While book bans continue across America, DPLA is proud to be part of a group of leading libraries committed to counteracting […]

Last week, in the run up to the Public Library Association’s conference in Columbus, Ohio, the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) partnered with Independent Publishers Caucus to host the inaugural IndieLib Forum. A first-of-its-kind gathering, IndieLib brought together independent publishers and librarians to connect and converse about issues crucial to both communities, yet all […]

Expression of Interest Form Following up on what we shared last week—that DPLA is launching a search for the next home of our cultural heritage aggregation program—I am excited to announce that we are now accepting expressions of interest, which you can submit via this form. In the time I have spent immersing myself in […]

I am writing to share with you some exciting news. As many of you know, we recently conducted a review of our hallmark program, the aggregation and sharing of nearly 50 million images and files from over 6,000 libraries and archives across the U.S. We are taking two conclusions from that process. First, we have […]

DPLA’s Metadata Working Group is proud to announce Practical Approaches for Reparative Description, a workshop series designed for people working with cultural heritage data looking to deepen their understanding and practice of reparative description. Reparative description focuses on remediating or contextualizing potentially outdated or harmful language used in descriptive practices, ensuring accuracy and inclusivity (definition derived from Yale’s Reparative Archival Description).

Please join us for the first IndieLib Forum, an exciting new event that will bring together libraries and independent publishers. In recent months, DPLA has been working closely with the Independent Publishers Caucus to explore ways that libraries and independent publishers can work together for mutual benefit.  To further this work, we will co-host IndieLib […]

Last week, the Outreach and Assessment and Metadata Working Groups presented “Introduction to OpenRefine,” a well-attended webinar led by Helen Baer, Digital Projects Librarian at Colorado State University. We are grateful to Helen for giving tips on how to get started with OpenRefine, a powerful metadata cleaning tool that can transform your DPLA metadata workflows, and for demonstrating many of the software’s most useful and relevant functions in an accessible manner.

Library lovers and self-published authors have a lot in common—they share a passion for books and reading and a desire to democratize access. For many years we at DPLA have heard interest from librarians in acquiring self-published titles. But because the corpus of self-published titles is so vast, deciding what to include in a library collection can feel like an overwhelming task to busy library selectors. When DPLA added our Indie Catalog, with nearly 500,000 self-published titles, to Palace Marketplace last year, we set out to alleviate this burden on libraries by creating Indie Selections, our own selections of self-published titles, carefully curated by our Curation Corps of librarians. 

As 2023 draws to a close, I want to thank each of you in DPLA’s ebook community for your continued support of and enthusiasm for our efforts to expand access. 2023 was a year of great growth in our ebooks work, and I wanted to reflect on some of those highlights with you: 

When the conversations that resulted in the birth of the Digital Public Library of America in 2010 began, it was with the belief that everyone should have access to knowledge and that the transition to digital should expand, not limit, that access. More than 10 years later, these principles are still guiding our work, despite the big shifts we’ve witnessed in our field and across our nation.

Since 2017, DPLA has been helping libraries meet the growing demand from readers for ebooks and audiobooks by working with publishers to provide licensing terms that help libraries maximize access and get the most out of their dollar. While the variety of options and licensing terms we have developed have been well received by our partners, they still do not allow libraries to own digital content outright, the way they do physical books.