Micah Vandegrift, Scholarly Communication Librarian at Florida State University Library, discusses the recently-launched Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) and its implications for librarians and libraries in general, providing a helpful overview of the project and its aims and stakeholders. Vandegrift clarifies that “DPLA is not a public library, a content repository, or a threat to traditional library services,” and speculates why DPLA has generated little response from large library organizations such as the American Library Association and OCLC. The article outlines four things that “librarians want … from DPLA: Advocacy, Inclusion, Investment and Clarity.” Vandegrift ends with a call for librarians to invest in the DPLA:

… I’d like to propose that we take them at their word and take ownership of this as a realistic, collaborative, inclusive, “public” opportunity to showcase one aspect of value for libraries in a digital world. Considering the practical implications of a national digital library for our daily work, we should contribute to the conversation and development of the platform, the portal and the partnerships that define the DPLA. If it is successful, DPLA could be a national treasure which brings to light the value and essential qualities of our beloved organizations, as well as the physical collections and intellectual issues that we labor on daily (copyright, fair use, information literacy, access). Even if we don’t each have the time to get personally involved, we ought to articulate the wide-ranging possibilities and benefits of such an idealistic enterprise to public schools, to higher education, and to citizenship and government. In fighting for the ideals on an ambitious project like DPLA, we are fighting for our own place in the information economy.

April 18, 2013, marked the launch of the Digital Public Library of America. Writing in the New York Review of Books, Robert Darnton, Harvard’s University Librarian and a DPLA founder, marked the occasion with an exclamation point–“The National Digital Public Library Is Launched!“– and framed the project as representative of “the confluence of two currents that have shaped American civilization: utopianism and pragmatism.” He continues:

How do these two tendencies converge in the Digital Public Library of America? For all its futuristic technology, the DPLAharkens back to the eighteenth century. What could be more utopian than a project to make the cultural heritage of humanity available to all humans? What could be more pragmatic than the designing of a system to link up millions of megabytes and deliver them to readers in the form of easily accessible texts?

Darnton describes the evolution of the DPLA, contextualizes it among other large-scale efforts, and provides a sense of how the project will progress.

Thus far, the DPLA provides discovery of select digital collections from NARA, Mountain West Digital Library, the Digital Library of Georgia, Harvard, NYPL, the Smithsonian, and a growing number of other content hubs. Partnerships fueling the library include content hubs, “large digital libraries, museums, archives, or repositories that provide a one-to-one relationship with the DPLA”; service hubs, “state or regional digital libraries that aggregate information” within their areas; and collaborators.

DPLA has made their API and Metadata Application Profile, “designed to build on the experience of the Europeana Data Model … to accommodate existing and emerging data models for library, archive, and museum resources,” publicly available. Indeed, the Search DPLA and Europeana app, developed by Jesus Dominguez, allows users to search across both platforms. Other tools, such as MetaLab‘s Library Observatory app  and Harvard’s Library Innovation Lab’s StackLife DPLA site, allow visualizations of searches and browsing across the collections. DPLA also features several themed exhibits, built using Omeka.

Writing in Library Journal‘s “The Digital Shift,” Matt Enis reported on public and librarian responses to be launch, observing:

Reactions on twitter were enthusiastic on Thursday. Rachel Frick, director of the Digital Library Federation Program, Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) posted “#dpla experiencing half million views per hour. NICE.” Jonathan Zittrain, Co-Founder and Director for Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society tweeted that “The @dpla has geocoded its archives — http://dp.la/map is wonderfully addictive. (Zooming in shows more and more.)” And the official account of NYPL Labstweeted “And for nerds like us, not only does @DPLA offer a SICK API, but there’s a BULK DATA DOWNLOAD too!”

And it’s a handsome website to boot.