This is an introduction to the Digital Public Library of America and to New York Heritage. It was put together for showing these web sites to school media librarians and others, an helping them to use it more effectively. It may also be used to find items for use in the Common Core curriculum.
3. 3
What is the Digital Public Library
of America?
DPLA is an all-digital library that
utilizes metadata and images from
many institutions all over the
world.
4. Some basic questions:
• Where is it located?
• Who is this?
• Why should you be interested?
• How does it work?
5. A further description of the DPLA
• Officially, the DPLA is “an open, distributed network
of comprehensive online resources that [draws] on
the nation’s living heritage from libraries, universities,
archives and museums in order to educate , inform,
and empower everyone on current and future
generations”.
• So, it’s not a place, but a pointer.
• Unoffically – it’s really cool! Here’s why I think so…
6. 6
• The DPLA is essentially a single point of entry
for a hub of information
• It’s an easy on-ramp for smaller organizations
• The DPLA contains aggregated metadata - not
the actual online items. Those remain at their
original location.
7. 7
Where and who?
• People, places…
How is it paid for? -
Private sources include the Sloan Foundation (which provided the initial planning grant, the
first large grant award of $2.5 million,the Arcadia Fund (which matched Sloan with another
$2.5 million), the Soros Foundation’s Open Society Institute, the Mellon Foundation and, most
recently, the Knight Foundation (which has just provided $1 million to support the new
service and content hubs in several of Knight’s core communities). Public agencies include
the National Endowment for the Humanities (which has provided two grants, totaling more
than $1 million) and the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
When did it go live? -
April 18, 2013.
8. 8
Why should be you be interested?
• Because…the DPLA is great at providing context,
pulling together strands of our history and cultural
heritage, and organizing those strands into one
tapestry of common knowledge.
• Contextualizing history, as told through the primary
source documents like government documents and
images is, in my mind, the #1 thing that DPLA does.
• And what good is a collection that no one uses?
28. The Context
• Lots of cultural heritage content is already available
online, and more content is coming online every day.
The Problem
•Unfortunately, much of this distributed
content is poorly discoverable and
underutilized by prospective users.
•That is to say, what good is a collection if no
one knows about it or uses it?
35. Summary
• DPLA is a networking platform that helps
cultural organizations maximize the
discovery and use of their content.
36. A group of librarians in the Kaaterskill (Catskill Mountains, New York),
1913. F. W. Faxon. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. American
Library Association Archives
37. Locally…
• Empire State Digital Network (New York)… the ESDN is the
first service hub to be created explicitly as a means for sharing
New York’s rich digital cultural heritage with the DPLA. The
Network will be administered by the Metropolitan New York
Library Council (METRO) in collaboration with eight allied regional
library councils collectively working as NY3Rs Association.This
includes the RRLC.
• Together, they will provide the necessary personnel and
technological infrastructure needed to contribute digital
resources from hundreds of New York’s libraries, archives,
museums, and cultural heritage institutions to the Digital Public
Library of America.
38. An example of
PondsStreamsOceans
• Which is a fancy way of saying that members of
the NewYorkHeritage.org site will be members
of the ESDN and thus in the DPLA.
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Further information?
• Who are local members?
• Who do you ask for detailed information - how
to join, costs involved expectations, etc?
• Frances Andreu - at the RRLC
• Experiences as a volunteer cataloging
metadata and scanning - Larry Naukam
41. What is the New York
Heritage Digital
Collections Project?
• The New York Heritage Digital Collections website, a project of the
NY3Rs Councils, provides the public with free access to digitized
collections of historical and cultural interest in New York State.
• It acts as a gateway to digital heritage collections across New York State.
• It offers a federated search of multiple CONTENTdm servers from the
regional 3Rs Councils.
• The goal of the project is to eventually connect 1000 collections and 1
million items throughout New York State. At present there are about 300
members and 300,000 items.
43. The Collections
• The collections represent a broad range of
historical, scholarly and cultural materials.
• Collections are held in libraries, museums and
archives throughout the state.
• The collections are used by educators, students,
researchers, genealogists, alumni, and donors.
• Collection items include photographs, letters,
diaries, directories, maps, newspapers, books and
more.
44. How can the collections be used?
• School libraries can use the collections to
connect to the curriculum and promote the use
of primary source materials.
• Public libraries can promote local history.
• The project allows for the public’s safe use of a
library’s “delicate” materials.
• Researchers can search multiple collections by
location and item type.
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Stats? You want stats?
Geneva Historical Society: 2754 items
3724 page views of this one collection in the past 7 months!
NY Heritage has 213 collections total with 449,239 items.
We had over 2 million site views with 479,521 views of RRLC collections.
RRLC currently has 17 contributors, with 61 different collections.
More specifically:
Between November 28th, 2012 and March 31st, 2013, we had 13,071 visits to nyheritage.org from 9,044
unique visitors, which amounted to 37,442 page views.
Between August 27th, 2012 and November 28th, 2012, we had 5,728 visits from 3,935 unique visitors,
amounting to 23,534 page views.
Extrapolating from those figures, nyheritage.org had about 28,000 visits from April 1st, 2012 to March 31st,
2013, and about 130,000 page views from about 23,000 unique visitors.
Now that we are a going to be part of the service hub for DPLA, [Digital Public Library of America] we will
be included in that. This will be huge for our viewership.
Sounds good to have collections more accessible!
65. Teaching the Hudson Valley
Beyond Field Trips
Teaching The Hudson Valley In Tough Times
Finding Free Primary Sources Online
and
Using Them In Your Classroom
Tessa Killian
Southeastern NY Library Resources
Council
Susan Stessin-Cohn
Historic Huguenot Street
Schultz's Studio, New Paltz, N.Y. Cows in
front of the New Paltz Creamery. Haviland-
Heidgerd Historical Collection, Elting
Memorial Library
66. Outline
• Primary sources
• Tour of online digital collections that contain primary sources
• Examples of lessons created from primary sources
• Try a lesson
• Create a lesson using a
primary source
World War II collection of boxes for the
Red Cross at a Milton School. Marlboro
Free Library.
67. Primary Sources
Visual Material
Maps
Films and Videos
Fine Art –
paintings, prints &
drawings
Photographs
Daguerreotypes
Audio
Speeches
Music
Interviews
Radio Shows
Places
Cemeteries
Cultured Landscapes –
Ellis Island, Gettysburg, Colonial
Williamsburg
Historic Museums -
Historic Huguenot Street,
Philipsburg Manor, etc.
Parks
Objects
Household Appliances
& Tools
Toys
Buildings
Monuments
Clothing
Primary
Documents
Census records
Government records
Personal papers
Business records
Organizational records
Special formats
68. Where to find primary sources online…
Digital collections contain primary source materials
Available from libraries, archives, museums and
cultural heritage organizations (national, state,
regional, university);
Have search and browse capabilities;
Include information about the resources
(bibliographic record or metadata);
Allow us to view and use materials that may
otherwise be unavailable.
Highway Bridge over Esopus Creek. New
York State Archives
72. Citing Sources & Copyright
MLA Format for a photograph:
Cramer, Konrad. Konrad Cramer Photograph of Hervey White.
Woodstock Public Library District. 24 July 2006 <http://www.hrvh.
org/u?/woodstock,108>.
The mission of the DPLA is to bring together the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and to make them freely available to the world.
The DPLA achieves this mission through its three main elements:
A portal for discovery that delivers students, teachers, scholars, and the public to incredible resources, where they may be in America.
A platform that enables new and transformative uses of our digitized cultural heritage. that enables new and transformative uses of our digitized cultural heritage.
An advocate for a strong public option in the 21st century.
The DPLA portal (http://dp.la/) serves as the point of access to over 5.4 million items—photographs, manuscripts, books, sounds, moving images, and more—from libraries, archives, and museums around the United States.
Users can browse and search the DPLA’s collections by timeline, map, visual bookshelf, format, and topic; save items to customized lists; and share their lists with others. Users can also explore digital exhibitions curated by the DPLA’s content partners and staff.
The objects in the DPLA cover hundreds of years of our cultural heritage. You can browse by century, decade, and year using the DPLA’s innovative timeline.
Curious to see what resources the DPLA has from your home state? From your college town? From the city where your parents were born? Hundreds of thousands of the objects in our database can be viewed on our map interface.
The bookshelf is an easy way to search DPLA’s books, serials, and journals. The darker the shade of blue, the more relevant the results. Click on a spine for details and related images. Book thickness indicates the page count, and the horizontal length reflects the book’s actual height.
The DPLA and its partners have curated a series of virtual exhibitions highlighting specific themes, such as activism in the United States, Prohibition, and a joint exhibition with Europeana, the pan-Europeana digital library, that tells the story of European emigration to the United States during the 19th and 20th centuries. These exhibitions include full photographs and detailed information about special topics.
The Content hubs are large digital libraries, museums, archives, or repositories that maintain a one-to-one relationship with the DPLA. Content hubs, as a general rule, provide more than 250,000 unique metadata records that resolve to digital objects (online texts, photographs, manuscript material, art work, etc.) to the DPLA, and commit to maintaining and editing those records as needed.
As of December 2013, the Content hubs include the following institutions:
ARTstor
Biodiversity Heritage Library
David Rumsey Map Collection
Harvard Library
HathiTrust Digital Library
National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)
New York Public Library
Smithsonian Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
University of Southern California Libraries
University of Virginia
The DPLA Service hubs are state or regional digital libraries that aggregate information about digital objects from libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural heritage institutions within its given state or region. Each Service hub offers its state or regional partners a full menu of standardized digital services, including digitization, metadata assistance and training, data aggregation and storage services, as well as locally hosted community outreach programs, bringing users in contact with digital content of local relevance.
As of December2013, the Service hubs include the following institutions:
Digital Commonwealth (Massachusetts)
Digital Library of Georgia
Empire State Digital Network (New York)
Kentucky Digital Library
Minnesota Digital Library
Mountain West Digital Library (Utah, Nevada, Southern Idaho, Arizona)
North Carolina Digital Heritage Center
Portal to Texas History
South Carolina Digital Library
To help visualize the relationship between the different pieces of the Service hub relationship, one can imagine your local historical society or public library as a pond, containing in it unique, valuable cultural content. These ponds send their content through tributaries to the lakes, the DPLA Service hubs, which aggregate data from the various cultural heritage institutions across their state or region, the ponds. The Service hubs then feed this content through rivers to the ocean, the DPLA.
OpenPics, for instance, is an open source iOS application for viewing images from multiple remote sources, including the DPLA API. Download it now for free from the Apple store!
Culture Collage is a simple tool that lets you search the DPLA’s image archives and view the results in a stream of images. Just keep scrolling to fetch more. Clicking on an image saves it to a scrapbook without losing your position in the stream.
Want a local copy of the DPLA’s data? All data in the DPLA repository (and provided through the API) is available for download. These include the standard DPLA fields, as well as the complete record received from the partner.
All data brought into the DPLA from its partners is normalized to the DPLA Metadata Application Profile (MAP) and enriched with useful information, such as geospatial data. GeoNames, for instance, is a geographical database containing millions of unique geographical names corresponding to discrete places on the globe. Through enrichments like this the DPLA is making cultural heritage data more useful and relevant to its users.
All things considered, the DPLA is an ever-growing national network of libraries, archives, museums, cultural heritage institutions, and volunteers, with a local impact in our communities, strengthened by a global reach.