Following a growing trend of digital portal libraries, the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) website launched in April 2013. The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University leads this ambitious project, which was sparked by an October 2012 meeting of forty leaders from libraries, foundations, academia, and technology projects. Starting from 2011, the Berkman Center took a two-year period to bring together hundreds of public and research librarians, innovators, digital humanists, and other volunteers helped to scope, design, and construct the DPLA. The project aims to collaborate online resources to create “an open, distributed network of comprehensive online resources that would draw on the nation’s living heritage from libraries, universities, archives, and museums in order to educate, inform, and empower everyone in […]
Tag: online
The Doujin Culture and the Pheromone of User Generated Content
Doujin (sometimes spelled dojin), is a phrase of Japanese invention, referring to groups of people with a specific interest. Although it began as literary societies in the Meiji era (1868-1912), modern doujin groups (often translated as Circle in English) refer to those that produce self-published works, which doujin has become an abbreviation for the created […]
Making the Invisible Visible: The Secret Vatican Archives.
With the surprise and somewhat sudden resignation of Pope Benedict XVI the Catholic Church and the Vatican have been thrust onto the world stage. While the world will be focused upon the conclave of cardinals who will elect a new Pope at the end of this March, little attention will be paid to the world […]
HathiTrust Digital Library for World Scholars
The HathiTrust Digital Library, which is a consortium of libraries working to digitize and make available a wide variety of cultural documents, has recently won an important “Fair Use” victory in court. What HathiTrust is doing is now legally considered “transformative,” but for researchers, HathiTrust has already been very transformative. HathiTrust has currently digitized over 10 […]
National Libraries: Working to Preserve a Nation’s Cultural Heritage
Libraries are important cultural institutions that work to not only provide universal access to information and knowledge, but also preserve the cultural heritage and identity of the communities they serve. National libraries such as the United States’ Library of Congress or Spain’s Biblioteca Nacional de España work to achieve these objectives on a national scale. […]