National digital library gains traction
For a 6-month-old, the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) already has grown quite large: from an initial 2.4 million available items in April to more than 5 million. Fame came fast too, “even in our infancy,” said DPLA Executive Director Dan Cohen. This free online portal into American culture was less than three weeks old when Time magazine named it one of the best 50 websites of the year. DPLA is an enormous free public library under a digital roof. With a few clicks of computer keys, users can access millions of links to online books, photographs, movies, and other cultural artifacts from collaborating institutions, including digital collections at the Harvard Library. Member libraries, museums, and exhibits contribute links for digitized materials — “metadata” — to nine regional or state aggregators, called service hubs. Twelve such contributors, each with 250,000 items or more, are content hubs that provide metadata directly to DPLA,...