One year of DPLA

Since its launch last year, the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) has been working hard on bringing together digitized cultural heritage materials from American libraries, archives, and museums, and making these available as freely and openly as possible.

Impressive progress has been made: today, at the celebration of its first birthday, the amount of content that is available through the DPLA portal has tripled in size to nearly 7 million items from over 1300 organisations. DPLA also announced that 6 major new partners have been added as content hubs (bringing the total amount to 15). These hubs are large content holders committed to providing, maintaining and editing over 200.000 unique metadata records to the DPLA portal.

Next to continually increasing the size of its collections, DPLA also recently partnered up with Europeana and Kennisland to work on creating and standardizing clear statements on the exact rights of digital objects. The working group responsible for this process aims to release its findings in the fall of 2014.

The full press release on DPLA’s first birthday is available from this page. Congratulations to DPLA on this great achievement, and on to a successful second year!