The Voices of Librarians and the DPLA
By Robert Darnton Mar 22, 2011Now that the campaign to create a Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) has gone into high gear, public librarians throughout the country have rallied behind it with offers of collaboration and support. They also want to make their voices heard during the phase of preliminary planning, which will give it shape.
The effort to launch the DPLA gathered momentum after a conference held at Harvard on October 1-2. An informal Steering Committee set its general direction and, with a grant from the Sloan Foundation, established a secretariat at Harvard's Berkman Center to handle correspondence and administration. Plans were laid for mobilizing support from foundations and for developing a detailed design to be presented at a "big tent" conference next summer or fall. Meanwhile, a series of workshops was organized to examine substantive issues in six areas: content and scope, finance and business models, governance, legal problems, technology, and audience and participation. The first workshop, which considered the material to be included in the DPLA and how it should conform to the needs of users, took place at Harvard on March 1. That is when public librarians began to set a new tone to the general debate.
Until March, the planning had been done by self-appointed volunteers, many of them clustered at Harvard. "Cloistered," some might say. Would the DPLA become a preserve of academics, a repository of esoteric works that might interest researchers but would bore everyone else in the general citizenry? To be sure, the first descriptions of the DPLA stressed its potential importance for community colleges, K-12 students, and everyone without access to a well-stocked library. But there were mutterings laced with that deadliest of pejoratives: "elitist."
In order to open its deliberations to anyone who might be interested, the DPLA secretariat set up a public wiki. And to invite the public to participate, it also created a listserv. The public reacted with a flood of email. In just a few weeks, more than 600 persons subscribed to the listserv. They came from all over the country, and they had suggestions that were all over the map-excellent suggestions, most of them decidedly unacademic. The greatest outpouring came from public librarians. Only a few of them had been invited to the March 1 meeting, which did indeed discuss their concerns, but outside the meeting room librarians everywhere responded to the opportunity of participating in a "conversation," as many of them put it--an open-ended, undirected, online free-for-all, which is giving them a voice in determining whatever the DPLA will become.
The following excerpts from their emails convey some idea of the response.
"The provision of electronic content is a huge challenge and opportunity for libraries...I am excited to be part of this discussion," Matt W, Westlake, Ohio.
"I'm Kate, a reference librarian in New York. I'm very excited to be here and look forward to the conversation that unfolds," Kate A, New York, N.Y.
"As a public librarian, my professional (and personal) interest here is to bring all of the great but dispersed collections into the light, making them easy to discover by my patrons. If all of the wonderful collections out there would be as easy to access and use as Wikipedia, I think we'll have done our job. Simply calling the project a digital public library because it is on the open web is misleading; a truly public library should be designed and built from the beginning with a general audience in mind," Oleg K, Lancaster, Louisiana.
"I'm fascinated by the importance of creating a sense of place when going digital, and how that can integrate smoothly with our physical locations," Sarah C, Portland, Oregon.
"I believe this is something that has to be done statewide or nationally. Islands of local or regional movements will not be enough for libraries to keep their value up in the minds of our patrons. I am hoping this project will lead to a nationwide effort of how libraries can continue to be an integral part of the reading ecosystem....We have a regional Overdrive Consortium of 21 libraries, and we know the pain of keeping something like this going. I would be happy to help out where I can," Adam W, Fort Worth, Texas
"I work with rural libraries and digital divide issues...I'm a Free Culture advocate and am looking forward to a glorious future where access to resources is simplified and accessible to as many people as possible," Jessamyn W, Randolph, Vermont.
"At the library where I work, we've got about 40,000 digital images scanned from our local history photo collection, and we are expanding the scope of our digitization to other types of materials and other collections. I'm hoping the hundreds of collections like this, here and at other libraries, will eventually be reachable through DPLA, whether or not the digital files are actually housed there...One of my hopes for the DPLA is that it will be truly public in scope, i.e. not another scholarly repository but created in such a way that public libraries everywhere will be easily able to contribute," Genny E, Sonoma County, California.
"Digitizing our unique collections, as well as making published content available to users in methods that they desire, are avenues that we as librarians need to explore for our future," Marlene H, Gainesville, Florida.
"The DPLA could be the greatest expansion in access to information for people who can't read print since the invention of Braille. Here's hoping that some of the great strides in the accessibility of digital collections that have been made at places like the University of Michigan can be made universal," William G, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
"I am passionate about access. I believe a combination of formats, including digital and print, in consortiums will be the future of libraries as we provide access to all," Melissa R, Long Beach, California.
The librarians had a great deal more to say about all sorts of subjects, but Nathaniel H. of San Jose, California, expressed the general sentiment:"I'm looking forward to being part of the conversation."
(Robert Darnton is the Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and University Librarian, Harvard University)
