DPLA Beta Sprint

DLF was one of 60 teams participating in a “beta sprint” toward a Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). DLF collaborated with the IMLS Digital Collections and Content (DCC) project at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC); the team comprised members affiliated with Rice University, the Digital Library Federation, the University Library at UIUC, and the Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship at UIUC.

The beta sprint effort proposed leveraging the DCC project’s cultural heritage collections from libraries, museums, and archives and developing new modes of interaction with this rich base of content. The effort would incorporate lessons learned from the DCC project and from other major aggregation initiatives.

There were four interrelated objectives within the framework of the beta sprint effort:

• Extend the DCC as a domestic foundation for curated content, principles, and processes for a DLPA prototype;
• Provide access to DCC’s rich collection of cultural and scientific heritage resources through a functional search service;
• Illustrate ways to increase public social engagement and enable curious exploration of nation-wide content through design mockups;
• Publish a supplementary report that reviews and compares the scope, services, and architectures of large-scale digital resource aggregations, including DCC, Europeana, and the National Science Digital Library (NSDL). This report by Geneva Henry enabled the DPLA community to better understand the factors that lead to success and identify challenges associated with various approaches used by large-scale aggregation projects.
• The basic mode of aggregation was to be much like Europeana, a meta-aggregator and portal to European digitized collections: metadata was centralized and indexed, providing integrated access to descriptions and thumbnails that link back to the digital object at the host institution. As an aggregator, DCC recognized the importance of retaining curated collections and institutional identity in large-scale aggregations. Collections and institutions both provide valuable organizational and intellectual context that users need for interpretation and use of digital materials, and for navigation through large bodies of distributed content.

For more information about the DLF/DCC beta sprint submission, see the narrative overview and supporting documents.