Notes from my summer library tour
I’ve been on the road for most of the summer meeting with DPLA network members and prospective partners. I’ve given about a dozen talks in as many cities over the last six weeks. (Two of the more recent ones were at Internet Archive’s Decentralized Web conference and the Blockchain National Forum hosted by San Jose State University.) I want now to reflect on what I’ve been sharing and hearing and pose some questions with which I’ve been wrestling.
My summer travels helped me to see the impact that the collaborative project that is the Digital Public LIbrary of America. I was able to meet our members in person at our first gathering last March at Georgia State University and in recent weeks have been able to spend time with DPLA member Hubs including Georgia’s GALILEO, Mountain West Digital Library, and Ohio Digital Network. These visits have affirmed my belief that DPLA does not exist on its own, but rather as part of a larger effort by individuals and organizations across the country, all with the common goal to, as we declared at our inception, build an “open, distributed network of comprehensive online resources that draws on the nation’s living heritage from libraries, universities, archives and museums to educate, inform and empower everyone in the current and future generations.”
Bob Darnton, one of our founders, compared DPLA at its launch to that of the nation. “The DPLA represents the confluence of two currents that have shaped American civilization: utopianism and pragmatism…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?”
We need DPLA even more today than we did five years ago. At a time when we are questioning how democracy can function in a digital age — when we are having serious conversations about whether the American experiment can continue — libraries, museums, and other civic institutions are more valuable than ever. Libraries in particular have three qualities that make them particularly valuable today. First, we promise a common civic experience in neighborhoods across the country — there are are more libraries than McDonald’s. Second, as we wrestle with what to and not to believe online, libraries are staffed by people professionally trained in the curation, collection, and sharing of information. And, third, the library, along with the fire departments and the military, remain one of the last civic institutions with widespread trust by the public.
Those qualities in and of themselves are not enough to preserve us. For one, we may not always be trusted: this spring’s report from OCLC and the American Library Association indicates that support for funding libraries, while still high, is falling. As technologies continue to rapidly evolve, the ways in which knowledge is conveyed will expand as well. To keep up with today’s consumers and creators, libraries need to be thinking about, experimenting with, new forms of storytelling, including games, videos and virtual and augmented reality. Lastly, as more and more knowledge becomes digital, we have the opportunity to reimagine our libraries themselves.
I’ve often heard that if libraries did not already exist, they would not be allowed to come into existence. This summer, I’ve been asking a slightly different question. I’ve borrowed from an interview with Lyft founder John Zimmer in which he tells the story of the company’s creation. A few years after starting his previous company, Zimride, he paused to ask the question, “if we started over today, what would we do?” That’s a difficult question for anyone to ask, but all the more so for legacy institutions like libraries and museums. But I fear if we don’t ask that question, openly and honestly, we risk the danger of becoming too comfortable with our place in the world and of becoming irrelevant when we are needed most.
I’m off the road for a bit, before visiting Recollection Wisconsin and Indiana Memory next month, and with our partners LYRASIS in October. In the meantime, our work continues. While I’ve been traveling, the team has been shipping tools, including a list-making feature, analytics dashboards, improved search, and more. (You can hear directly about our new tech and data products in a webinar we’re hosting Tuesday afternoon.) We’ve doubled the offerings in Open Bookshelf, our digital library of free ebooks, since launching it earlier in June. These products are in addition to the ongoing growth of our network and collections. District Digital and Plains to Peaks Collective recently became the newest contributors to DPLA. Our partners have contributed over 850,000 new items to DPLA this summer, bringing the total available to more than 22 million. Our member network also kicked off working groups on assessment, rights statements, outreach, metadata, and technology.
I hope you’ll join us Tuesday to learn more about what we’ve been up to, and that you’ll continue to be part of our work to continue to build the Digital Public Library of America.
