Nine “Beta Sprint” Proposals To Be Featured at Digital Public Library of America Meeting
The steering committee for the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) announced today that it has invited the creators of nine project proposals to present their work at the DPLA’s upcoming plenary meeting, scheduled for October 21 in Washington, DC (which LJ will be attending and covering).
The proposals were submitted as part of the DPLA’s “beta sprint,” first announced in May, in which the committee asked for ideas to be submitted “that demonstrate how the DPLA might index and provide access to a wide range of broadly distributed content.”
The projects were selected out of 38 final submissions, and their authors include many familiar institutions from the library world—from the Library of Congress to HathiTrust to the Harvard Library Lab.
Here’s a list of the six main projects to be presented and their descriptions from the DPLA announcement:
Digital Collaboration for America’s National Collections: The Digital Collaboration demonstrates the ability of three disparate, major national institutions to work together through one unified search tool. Submitted by the National Archives, the Library of Congress, and the Smithsonian Institution.
DLF/DCC: DPLA Beta Sprint: The DLF/DCC Beta Sprint project serves as a search tool for the DCC’s collection of cultural and scientific heritage resources, presenting unique ways of organizing and presenting materials and metadata. Submitted by CLIR: Digital Library Federation and the University of Illinois – Urbana Champaign, School of Information, Science and Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship.
extraMUROS: extraMUROS proposes to shape the Digital Public Library of America into a multimedia-library-without-walls through an open source, HTML5 platform. Submitted by metaLAB (at) Harvard, the Harvard Library Lab, and Media And Place (MAP) Productions.
Government Publications: Enhanced Access and Discovery through Open Linked Data and Crowdsourcing: The Committee on Institutional Cooperation (or CIC) has been leading a coordinated effort to digitize government documents. The project continues with an approximate target of digitizing a total of 1+ million print documents. Submitted by the University of Minnesota, the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, and HathiTrust.
Metadata Interoperability Services: Metadata Interoperability Services (MINT) is a web-based platform that enables the aggregation of rich and diverse cultural heritage content and metadata. Submitted by MINT at the National Technical University of Athens.
ShelfLife and LibraryCloud: ShelfLife is intended to provide users with a rich environment for exploring the combined content of the DPLA, discovering new works, and engaging more deeply with them via social interactions. LibraryCloud is the backend metadata server that supports ShelfLife. Submitted by the Harvard Library Innovation Lab and multiple partners. [See previous LJ coverage of these two projects here.]
The creators of three more projects (Bookworm from the Cultural Observatory at Harvard, the DPLA Collection Achievements & Profiles System from North Carolina State University Libraries, and WikiCite) will also be featured at the meeting, during an additional “lightning round” of presentations.
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Library of Congress Posts Twitter Updates on Thomas Home Page
The Library of Congress has updated its THOMAS legislative information page to include dynamic updates from the library’s @THOMASdotgov Twitter feed on the homepage in the right column.
“One of our goals with the Twitter account is to provide timely alerts about legislative developments and, with this change, now we can do that directly from the homepage,” Andrew Weber wrote on the Law Library blog.
Visitors can now also browse legislation by subject terms. A user can see how many items have been tagged with each subject during a session of Congress. Also added to the Help section is a page on Putting THOMAS on Your Site which allows a developer to put a search box directly on any website.
The last update, according to Weber’s blog post, was to URLs within the Share/Save toolbar. By clicking on Share/Save, a user can share the permanent link for a bill on Facebook, Twitter, or email it.
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