Wednesday, September 19, 2012

University of Kentucky to Participate in Building the Digital Public Library of America


UK Libraries and the Kentucky Digital Library have been selected to receive funding from the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) to serve as one of the initial content hubs. Kentucky was selected based on the strengths of our technology and our content.  The National Endowment for the Humanities and the Knight Foundation have each committed $1M to support this initial pilot of the program. We will be receiving roughly $350K for our initial two years of participation. Kentucky is one of four large content hubs to be selected (Georgia, Minnesota, Mountain West Digital Library and Kentucky); there are also four smaller hubs (Oregon, South Carolina, Massachusetts, and Illinois) that will participate.


The DPLA (http://dp.la) is envisioned to serve as a national digital library that will bring together the living heritage from libraries, universities, archives, and museums in order to educate, inform and empower everyone in the current and future generations.  It will be much more than an aggregate of the content – tools are being developed that will enable anyone to use the content in innumerable creative ways and will allow people to truly engage with the content.  This project will be a game changer for digital access to cultural heritage.

The best creative minds who are deeply engaged in digital access to information are being tapped to work on DPLA.  The goals are high but with hard work and determination they are being met.  This is a very high visibility project.  The initial rollout of the project is scheduled for April 2013.    

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