 Hi there. My name is John Palfrey, and I'm the chairman of the steering committee of the Digital Public Library of America process, and I wanted just to give a brief update on where things stood with the DPLA through this video from Cambridge, Massachusetts. It's the very end of June, 2011, and there are two things that I wanted to report out on. One is the overall DPLA process, and second, the substance of what the DPLA may emerge into, what it may be. So as to the process, the most recent developments have been the very exciting feedback we've gotten from our beta sprint announcement. In May, we urged anyone who wished to build part of the DPLA to send us a letter of intent that they would be building something for our beta sprint over the course of the summer. As of June 15, due date for this, we had 66 zero applications or notices that people would be submitting to the beta sprint. All these beta sprint proposals and code and so forth are due on September 1, 2011. I'm extremely eager to see what we get from these 60 submissions, and extremely grateful to all those people who have agreed to work on it, and presumably sprinting right now. Many of these are partnerships among public and private libraries, and there are big federal agencies involved and individuals involved and big institutions like Internet Archive. We're fabulous, and we're very grateful to everybody who's working on it right now. What's going to happen thereafter is we'll have an external review board who will take a peek at these submissions, and we'll spend some time pushing them around, and will then help us to make selections of some of these beta sprinters to present at what we plan to be a big tent meeting in Washington, D.C. The date is set nominally for October the 21st for this big tent meeting. It's going to be hosted at the National Archives, which I'm personally very excited about. The Archivist of the United States, David Ferriero, very generously is hosting us there and will be convening this event. It'll be a publicly available event, and we'll webcast it and so forth. The idea will be to present some of these beta sprints to show people what a DPLA could be, and also to plan for the next steps thereafter. Our game plan is that it'll be 18 months roughly after that kickoff in October until we have a prototype. That's the game plan as of now. Something like the spring of 2013, there will be a DPLA, and that's the idea. Obviously much stands between here and there in terms of hard work and building consensus and talking to lots of people and raising money and so forth, but I'm confident that we're on a great track for it. Second, I wanted to give a few words about what the DPLA is and where it might be headed as a substantive matter. This is something that we have very carefully been trying to do as a process as opposed to having a clear sense of what it might be. So I just wanted to give a snapshot. Basically back in October of 2010, a group of about 30 people came together and agreed upon a sentence, a sentence about what a DPLA could be. And by March of last year, we had worked with a slightly broader group and camped with a four-page concept note, which is up on the DPLA wiki. If you're interested in that, just Google DPLA wiki and you'll come up with it. And the concept note on there builds it out a little bit more articulately. And I think we're now at a point where it's coming into focus, at least for me, that there will be five elements of a DPLA. The first element is, of course, there will be content. There will be some information in a DPLA. This could take the form of books. It could be images, moving images, audio files, and so forth. So it's not just books. I'm thinking that the initial Digital Public Library of America will be something on the order of 10 million objects. Think about it at that order of magnitude. Who knows, it may be more or less. But the idea is a very big library. It's not meant to be the biggest ever library. But initially, I think it will have a large-scale critical mass. And 10 million objects is just a goal. You can imagine drawing upon lots of things in the public domain that have already been digitized by the Library of Congress, by many different partners within the DPLA, which are public libraries, academic libraries, and so forth. But there would be a corpus of information. This would be made available on a free-to-all basis. I'm thinking about the words above the Boston Public Library as you walk in, that beautiful inscription that says, free to all. So the notion would be, however we obtain the rights to them, and we'll obviously do this entirely lawfully, from the end user perspective, the content will always be free as it would be at a public library. Second, this will be metadata. So the second element of the DPLA is there will be information about the information. There will be things like catalog records, circulation data, reviews, and so forth that describe and make findable and useful the information in the content part. My sense is this will be as open as we possibly can make it. I believe in open access to metadata. We've been very interested in and working with people who are focused on linked open data, interoperability among data. This may also be a way that we can connect the DPLA with the European effort at this metadata layer. You can imagine a server that hosts all of this metadata and people can use it for various purposes. Third, there'll be code that is part of the DPLA. This will be open source code wherever possible so that people can in fact make their own little DPLA. So let's imagine that we've got the large DPLA.org, which is a place where people can come and get access to this information with a certain kind of interface. But we would imagine the code being such that somebody could make their own version of a DPLA, perhaps for a specific public library or for a particular historical society or for a particular academic library or K to 12 environment so people could take the code, take that content, take that metadata and form it into their own library. So it'll be a resource for all of these different parties. Fourth, it'll be very open and easy to use tools and services. So one thing that we recognize is not every library, certainly not every library of every size, has technical people on staff who could take open source code and do something with it off of, say, source forage. That would be nice if everybody could. But we know that we'll have to make tools and services that are somewhat simpler to use and that allow people very easily to curate a collection or to create a DPLA or a digital public library for a town or for a historic society. You can imagine it also taking the form of mobile scanning operations. So you could imagine a project I like the name of, the Scanabago, which I've heard some people talk about, driving Winabagos across certain areas, going to historical societies, going to local libraries and helping people to scan materials that might be of local interest, have them fold up into the DPLA, but also be curated locally as part of a local collection that otherwise might not get put into a digital collection. So the fourth is open tools and services that make it very easy for people to use and to be a support system for the public libraries and others who are doing cultural heritage work in America. Then fifth, it's a community. I see this very much as something that's emerging in a way like Wikipedia, which I think is a great model in some ways, maybe like the IETF, the Internet Engineering Task Force. These are obviously slightly different communities, but in both cases, these are open processes to the extent possible that allow people to participate broadly. And overall, we have a very large group of volunteers who are coming together to create the DPLA. I foresee a very lightweight structure, something that doesn't grow into a large scale heavyweight organization, but rather something highly distributed where lots of people can see themselves participating and succeeding in it. I like the idea of a Wikimania style event once a year where people interested in the DPLA might come together and hang out and work on projects related to the DPLA and then go back to their relevant libraries or communities and so forth for the rest of the time through a volunteer mode. So there will be a community built around the DPLA. And I think the very active group that's already on the wiki and the listserv and those who have already agreed to submit as part of the beta sprint, those 60 sprinters, I see the beginnings of that community where people share this ideal of creating a free to all, free for all American library of this sort. So that's the basic update on the DPLA. I want to just share the current thoughts as of this last day of June 2011 and very grateful for your interest and attention with respect to this project. If you have anything that you would like to let us know, please contact us. The secretariat of the DPLA is based at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University where I think easily found on the web and please do send us a note or give us a call if you'd like to be involved one way or another. Thanks so much.