 Welcome all to the Digital Public Library America West Meeting. Hooray! This is part of the ongoing mission of the Digital Public Library American to define itself, demonstrate really used to Americans and to people around the world. I'm Brewster Cale, the Digital Librarian at the Internet Archive. This is our home. So welcome to our home. Thank you very much for coming. We're a library and we bought this building a couple of years ago because it matched our logo. We had visions of flattening the floor and making this whole space into a grand library, but exactly what does a library look like in this digital age? We didn't quite know so we left the pews in. So thank you for sitting in pews as Garrison Keeler would put it, it seats for sinners. So if you go in and standing up every so often I'd say is a good thing, but please enjoy. Another couple of administrative points, there should be Internet access that works. Internet Archive, you're on a 10 gigabit connection to the Internet so if you want to download something now's your time to do it. There's restrooms downstairs on either side and there's even a porta potty out front. Please wander around the building and enjoy and a couple of things that you just sort of fun and games. If you turn around and see the blue blinking lights, those are servers of the Internet Archive that are serving the public. It's about two and a half petabytes of data that is stored there and every time a light blinks is either somebody downloading something or uploading something to the Internet Archive. We get about two million people a day using the Internet Archive collections and so that's what that is. The little guys on the sides are terracotta archivists. They're us, if you will, if you work for the Internet Archive for three years you get a little statue of you and it's sort of our way of saying thank you as we imagined what the Emperor of China did a few years ago. There's another stop on your tour that I hope you'll make sometime when you're on a break or lunchtime. Around the corner is a scanning center of the Internet Archive. We scan about 1,000 books a day in 30 scanning centers in six countries and books, microfilm and there's also whole movies being digitized down there. Just go around the corner and go and introduce yourself and look around and poke around. It's pretty fun. We see ourselves as a node in the burgeoning constellation that is going to be the Digital Public Library of America. We're still not actually sure exactly how it weaves together this world but we know that everything's now digital. That we really want, at least if it's going to be majorly accessed, it's going to be in digital form. Really getting our libraries moving forward into this digital world to digitize existing materials, collect materials that are already digital and help people find access, use, build and love our cultural heritage that is now in digital form is the goal of the Digital Public Library of America. Thank you and welcome very much to this meeting. Hope you have a good time. Next is Luis Herrera, the librarian at the San Francisco Public Library. Thank you and good morning everyone. I am delighted to be here. The House of Brewster and very spiritual in many ways. But I also want to mention that it's really an honor to be part of the steering committee for DPLA and to have the opportunity to co-host along with the Internet Archives. I should do a shout out for Brewster because we have an amazing relationship and partnership with the Internet Archives. How lucky are we to have it in our own backyard and to be able to work together. So we actually engaged in what we call a partnership for workforce development. About a year and a half ago we actually jointly hired almost 65 individuals that were unemployed to help us in a digital scanning project. The result of that benefited not only the Internet Archives but certainly the San Francisco Public Library in being able to digitize about 2100 items that were previously not available to our public. So it was really, really a wonderful opportunity to work together and we hope to continue in those endeavors. But I'm also here to represent, if you will, the perspective of public libraries. I am so thrilled to be a part of it because the digital public library does hold tremendous hope and opportunity for public librarians and the work that we do in so many ways. First of all, we all know the story that's unfolding nationwide about the resurgence of libraries during this economic downturn. San Francisco obviously is no exception. We're seeing remarkable resurgence of use. This year we'll see about 7 million people visit our libraries. Almost 13 million items circulated throughout the city. So it's fantastic to see that. We're also going through an amazing renaissance for our building program because San Franciscans have really put their money where their mouth is in terms of demonstrating the commitment to secure stable funding and expand our services. So we've actually renovated 16 neighborhood libraries. Some of these are beautiful Carnegie libraries. We've also built eight new buildings. We've completed 22 of 24 projects. So talk about a major transformation. We're delighted about that. But I want to add that it's more than the physical spaces that makes this city special. It's also about the amazing collections and resources that we have. And certainly the dynamic staff that makes it all happen. What we want to do and one of the reasons we're excited about DPLA is because these collections, whether it's about the 1906 earthquake or it's about the amazing legacy of Harvey Milk in the archives that we have in our library, all of that is a tip of the iceberg. And we want to see that cultural narrative share not only at the local level but at the state level, global level if you will. So that's the opportunity that DPLA holds for us and we want to share. And so we want to hear about the benefits that we would gain by participating but also not only our nation but the world in terms of these collections. The other reflection I have is that it's also very important to have the ethnic and racial communities represented in DPLA. And to that end, what better city than to represent whether it's from the mission to Chinatown, to Japantown, all those amazing local archives that at some point we'd love to see share throughout the world and throughout the nation. So we're very excited about participating. We're delighted to be co-hosting with the Internet Archives. And so I hope you have a terrific day because yesterday we certainly had a very solid dialogue with the various work stream participants and made some great progress towards the future of DPLA. So with that, I'd like to now introduce the Vice Chair of our Steering Committee and a wonderful supporter through the Sloan Foundation. He's also Vice Chair of the Sloan Foundation, Doran Weber. Doran. Thank you. Thank you, Louise. Hi, everybody. It's a pleasure to be here on behalf of the Sloan Foundation and to participate in this first ever West Coast plenary meeting on the creation of a digital public library of America. It is the first, right? Although DPLA is a national and ultimately a global concept, a worldwide network or web of libraries, universities, archives, and museums, much of the innovation underlying the digital revolution was born and continues to thrive on the West Coast. So it's very fitting that we assemble here. It's great to see such an impressive group of leaders and experts and students, people who care about libraries and education and literacy and community. Thank you also to the DPLA Steering Committee and to the DPLA Secretary at the Berkman Center, so masterfully steered by John Palfrey, and a special thank you to our host, the visionary Brewster Kale and his team at the Internet Archive. As we gather to discuss several key issues, we note that despite significant progress, many hard decisions remain to be made. We're still grappling with the fundamental question of what exactly is the DPLA and what content will it contain, whether it will be a mere pointer to other collections or some kind of repository, how will it deal with orphan works and the in copyright material or whether it should deal with them at all, who will be DPLA's first leader, executive director, we have exactly one year to conduct our search and fill this position and where and how will he or she govern and raise funds and oversee a sustainable business model, and who will actually use the DPLA, how will they access it, and what value added will they get once they arrive there. These are all legitimate, even urgent questions and we need to resolve them or at least to find sufficient answers in the next 12 months so we can be up and running in a phase one DPLA by April 2013. But we should not forget how far we've already come. People have been talking about and striving towards the dream of an integrated digital library system for close to 20 years. The digital revolution may have rendered the traditional library obsolete but it also gave us the tools, the worldwide web, mass digitization, link data and interoperability, virtual clouds to create a new paradigm where individuals can go to access all the information and the knowledge that human civilization has to offer online while preserving the physical library as a local center for community, citizenship, education and empowerment. The Sloan Foundation has been pursuing, or should I say chasing, this vision for about eight years now through our universal access to knowledge program. We were early supporters of the Internet Archive, the Library of Congress, Wikipedia, the Boston Library Consortium, Lyricist, Biodiversity Heritage Library and the Medical Heritage Library among others. In October 2010, we gave a small grant to the Radcliffe Institute for a meeting hosted by Robert Darrington where participants agreed to work together toward the creation of, and I quote, 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 the current and future generations. I can still recall standing before the whiteboard with an early draft of that sentence and having 40 very prominent attendees, many of whom are in this room, edited for me while I pleaded that whatever changes they wanted and whatever other issues they had, we all agree on one teeny-eeny little statement. That meeting and that sentence generated enormous excitement and energy. In December 2010, Sloan gave the Berkman Center at Harvard a planning grant to act as a secretariat for this effort, provisionally called Digital Public Library of America, or DPLA. By January 2011, a blue-rimmed steering committee had been formed and an active Wikian discussion listserv created. In March, the first meeting on content and scope, one of the six work streams was held at Harvard's Berkman Center. In April, DPLA engaged with many funders and secured additional support from the National Endowment for Humanities and the Open Society Institute. In May, we held a workshop in Amsterdam on link data and interoperability and also met with Europeana about ways we might work together. We also mounted a beta sprint to develop a working technical prototype. In June, we held another workshop at the Library of Congress on technical architecture and the Sloan Foundation approved an $836,000 grant to the Berkeley Law Center to support the legal workstream of the DPLA initiative by developing solutions to copyright law obstacles facing public library initiatives. By July, over 40 serve submissions for the beta sprint were received and in September, an expert review panel selected the most promising candidates for development. In October 2011, the DPLA concept was officially launched at a plenary meeting in Washington, DC, hosted by the National Archives. Supported by a $2.5 million grant from Sloan and a matching $2.5 million grant from Arcadia, we announced a grassroots process to build a concrete work plan for a national digital library system to develop a functional technical prototype and to pilot content digitization efforts, which are going to focus on immigration. That was only six months ago and in the interim there have been a flurry of work streams, meetings and workshops and legal conferences and technical developments culminating in today's plenary. That initial sentence is now a seven-page concept paper and while key questions remain, the DPLA vision is clarifying and solidifying. The Digital Public Library of America is a big bold idea for our digital age, a collaborative public-private effort to support and complement our existing library system and to enhance access to knowledge for people everywhere. We're on the verge of a major transformation and it's great to watch it grow and develop and to be a small part of it. Thank you for coming and hopefully for believing in this vision and for helping us to make it into a new reality. And now I'd like to introduce John Pawfrey, the chair of the steering committee. Thank you. Thank you, Doran. Doran, thank you so much and of course you are much more than a small part of this, but a sustained supporter of so many of us in the room starting with Brewster and all the way through. Thank you for your sustained commitment to this idea. And importantly, thanks to all of you for being here for this West Coast plenary kickoff. We couldn't be more excited about it. A series of important thanks from the secretary at one to Brewster and Robert and their teams. This is a public-private partnership in every form and the extent to which yesterday we were at San Francisco Public Library working with Luis and Jill and their teams today with Brewster and Robert and ours. The Berkman Center team from the East Coast and I want to thank in particular our colleagues Robert Darten, Mora Marks, Rebecca Haycock and others. This is a wonderful collaboration. I'd like just one more time to thank Brewster and also Luis for their local hosting of this kickoff. So in a couple minutes, we're gonna have the exciting perspectives on the DPLA session where a handful of people from very diverse perspectives will come and talk about why this is so important and why it's so exciting and for those of you who are gonna be on this next panel, you're gonna come around that screen and then up to here. So in a moment I will call you up. But just a couple of logistical notes before we do that. First, the hashtag for the event is Pound DPLA West. We hugely encourage tweeting and blogging and photographs and so forth. So please do send those things out. Take pictures of the great graphic artists as they render what's going on and spread this broadly to the world. I wanna send a particular shout out to those people who are here in the pews but also those who are not right now in the room. We had, as we did with our East Coast plenary, the exciting and disappointing thing of having to close registration at 400 people. We shut off registration some time ago. But what happened was a bunch of people said we wanna live stream this in nodes out there in the world. So just as we'll have nodes of the DPLA, we have nodes of watchers. So I wanna send a particular shout out on the video cast here to our friends at Simmons in Boston, New York Public Library Labs, the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Massachusetts, the Southern Tier Library System, South Central Regional Library Council, Utica Public Library and RECOW Research Library all in New York that are holding live streams right now. So thank you all for joining and lots of individuals out there. We welcome you to San Francisco, even if you're not with us in person and very much hope that you will be later. So it's truly great, I think, to have this hybrid experience of people in the pews and active here in the Church of Brewster and Internet Archive as well as active in the digital form. And I think that's a great metaphor for what we're doing and what we're building. And if you get anything out of today's events, I hope it's a sense of growing excitement and growing momentum of the sort that Doran described and that you understand as warmly as possible the very big welcome from all of us involved in this project, whether you're in a public library or in a private setting, whether you're in the government or in the private sector, this is something that we truly see as an open and inclusive movement building toward an amazing public resource and hope that you will join us after today as well whether you're on the video cast or here right now. So now we're gonna pivot to the first panel. So I'll encourage our next speakers to come around this way and please join me in thanking our welcoming panel and we'll be with you in a moment.