The Digital Public Library of America, a project aimed at providing free online access to the nation’s cultural repositories, has tripled in size to more than seven million items from more than 1 300 institutions since it opened a year ago.
The noncommercial effort, whose offices are located inside the Boston Public Library, gained steam following a 2011 federal court ruling that derailed Google’s plan to build the world’s largest digital library. It does not own any of the items in its catalog, but instead allows users to access them both through its own website, dp.la, and through various regional service hubs.
The library’s holdings, which come from institutions ranging from the Smithsonian and the New York Public Library to the Minnesota Streetcar Museum and the Montana Memory Project, include items in more than 400 languages, the project’s executive director, Dan Cohen, said in an interview. They can be accessed by various search tools, including a map that allows users to search for items by state.
The digital library also features a library of a dozen apps, including OpenPics, which allows users to call up on their smartphones materials relating to buildings around them, and (yes, this is the Internet) HistoricalCats, a bot that posts feline-related images from the library’s collections randomly on Twitter.
“We’re trying to bring together and make openly available to the world the contents of America’s archives, libraries and museums,” Mr. Cohen said. “As much material as we can get online and made available, the better.”
Source: ArtsBeat
