Exciting work is afoot with the potential to have a major impact on education in the US and abroad, an auspicious marker event in our "information age." The Digital Public Library of America will be formally launched on April 18.
Its mission statement describes the library as “an open, distributed network of comprehensive online resources that will draw on the nation’s living heritage from libraries, universities, archives, and museums in order to educate, inform, and empower everyone in current and future generations.”
Robert Darnton* writes in the current issue of The New York Review of Books (April 25, 2013):
(*Robert Darnton is Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and University Librarian at Harvard.)
[The DPLA] is a project to make the holdings of America’s research libraries, archives, and museums available to all Americans—and eventually to everyone in the world—online and free of charge. How is that possible?... Speaking broadly, the DPLA represents the confluence of two currents that have shaped American civilization: utopianism and pragmatism.
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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?
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Thanks to the Internet and a pervasive if imperfect system of education, we now can realize the dream of Jefferson and Franklin. We have the technological and economic resources to make all the collections of all our libraries accessible to all our fellow citizens—and to everyone everywhere with access to the World Wide Web. That is the mission of the DPLA.
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The DPLA has designed its infrastructure to be interoperable with that of Europeana, a super aggregator sponsored by the European Union, which coordinates linkages among the collections of twenty-seven European countries. Within a generation, there should be a worldwide network that will bring nearly all the holdings of all libraries and museums within the range of nearly everyone on the globe. To provide a glimpse into this future, Europeana and the DPLA have produced a joint digital exhibition about immigration from Europe to the US, which will be accessible online at the time of the April 18 launch.
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Several of the country’s greatest libraries and museums—among them Harvard, the New York Public Library, and the Smithsonian—are prepared to make a selection of their collections available to the public through the DPLA. Those works will be accessible to everyone online at the launch on April 18, but they are only the beginning of aggregated offerings that will grow organically as far as the budget and copyright laws permit.
Of course, growth must be sustainable. But the greatest foundations in the country have expressed sympathy for the project. Several of them—the Sloan, Arcadia, Knight, and Soros foundations in addition to the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute of Museum and Library Services—have financed the first three years of the DPLA’s existence. If a dozen foundations combined forces, allotting a set amount from each to an annual budget, they could create the digital equivalent of the Library of Congress within a decade. And the sponsors naturally hope that the Library of Congress also will participate in the DPLA.
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How will such material be put to use? I would like to end with a final example. About 14 million students are struggling to get an education in community colleges—at least as many as those enrolled in all the country’s four-year colleges and universities. But many of them—and many more students in high schools—do not have access to a decent library. The DPLA can provide them with a spectacular digital collection, and it can tailor its offering to their needs. Many primers and reference works on subjects such as mathematics and agronomy are still valuable, even though their copyrights have expired. With expert editing, they could be adapted to introductory courses and combined in a reference library for beginners.
At one time or other, nearly every student comes in contact with a poem by Emily Dickinson, who probably qualifies as America’s favorite poet. But Dickinson’s poems are especially problematic. Only a few of them, horribly mangled, were published in her lifetime. Nearly all the manuscript copies are stored in Harvard’s Houghton Library, and they pose important puzzles, because they contain quirky punctuation, capitalization, spacing, and other touches that have profound implications for their meaning. Harvard has digitized the originals, combined them with the most important printed editions (one edited by Thomas H. Johnson in 1955 and one edited by Ralph W. Franklin in 1981), and added supplementary documentation in an Emily Dickinson Archive, which it will make available through its own website and the DPLA.
The online archive will enrich the experience of students at every level of the educational system. Teachers will be able to make selections from it and adjust them to the needs of their classes. By paying close attention to different versions of a poem, the students will begin to appreciate the way poetry works. They will sharpen their sensitivity to language in general, and the lessons they learn will help them gain possession of their cultural heritage. It may be a small step, but it will be a pragmatic advance into the world of knowledge, which Jefferson, in a utopian vein, described as “the common property of mankind.”