[nfb-talk] Fw: Rapid Growth for Digital Public Library.

[Ed Meskys]

Will we be able to access this? Ed Meskys
----- Original Message ----- 
Sent: Wednesday, April 23, 2014 11:11 AM
Subject: Rapid Growth for Digital Public Library.


ARTSBEAT.
Rapid Growth for Digital Public Library.
NY Times Wednesday, 2014_04_23
By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER. The Digital Public Library of America, a project
aimed at providing free online access to the nation's cultural repositories,
has tripled in size to more than seven million items from more than 1,300
institutions since it opened a year ago, the group has announced.
The noncommercial effort, whose offices are located inside the Boston Public
Library, gained steam following a 2011 federal court ruling that derailed
Google's plan to build the world's largest digital library. It does not own
any of the items in its catalog, but instead allows users to access them
both through its own website, dp.la, and through various regional service
hubs..
The library's holdings, which come from institutions ranging from the
Smithsonian and the New York Public Library to the Minnesota Streetcar
Museum and the Montana Memory Project, include items in more than 400
languages, the project's executive director, Dan Cohen, said in an
interview. They can be accessed by various search tools, including a map
that allows users to search for items by state.
The digital library also features a library of a dozen apps, including
OpenPics, which allows users to call up on their smartphones materials
relating to buildings around them, and (yes, this is the Internet)
HistoricalCats, a bot that posts feline-related images from the library's
collections randomly on Twitter.
'We're trying to bring together and make openly available to the world the
contents of America's archives, libraries and museums,' Mr. Cohen said. 'As
much material as we can get online and made available, the better.
This is a more complete version of the story than the one that appeared in
print..