The Digital Public Library of America, an organization dedicated to building a large-scale digital public library that will make the cultural and scientific record available to all, held its first plenary meeting in Washington DC this morning and announced $5 million in funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and Arcadia Fund. “What Carnegie did for public libraries a century ago, the DPLA could–if successful–accomplish for our era,” Peter Baldwin, Chair of the Donor Board at the Arcadia Fund.
The organization says it is founded on four key elements: open source code, linked meta-data, multi-media content and tools and services. What would a new world online be without a new public library?
The Harvard-born organization is meeting today to discuss the best of almost 40 different submissions to a code sprint began this Summer. Proposals range from building a real-time collaboration layer online for all the libraries in the country, to cataloging every state’s cultural resources online to multiple systems of organization for all the data available.
The Berkman Center for Internet and Society, DPLA’s parent organization, is live streaming and live tweeting today’s plenary meeting here.
