| David Weinberger Co-Director, Harvard Library Innovation Lab Harvard University |
Paul Deschner Developer, Harvard Library Innovation Lab Harvard University |
The platform for the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) is being built to make maximally available what libraries and other curatorial institutions know about works, ideas, relationships, usage patterns, and more. This description is broad and general because the DPLA is a loose federation of major institutions (as well as smaller ones) that has not yet come to full agreement about what specifically it wants to present to end users. The group’s charge is to build a metadata server with open APIs that will enable and encourage developers to create applications that cannot be anticipated. The metadata may eventually include records for millions of items and many thousands of collections, all of which do not adhere to established standards. The service becomes more valuable as it is able to present developers with richer and deeper responses that make sense of the jumble of content at which the server points. The problems are large and knotty in every direction.
http://dp.la/dev
http://dp.la/dev/wiki
http://dp.la/dev/blog
Handout (MS Word)