 Hi, I'm Ben. And I'm Merida. And we're interns at the Bergman Center working on the Digital Public Library of America initiative. We're really fascinated by some of the data sprints and missions of interest we got. We wanted to talk to some local data sprinters about their projects and the DPLA in general. First, we headed over to the Harvard Library Innovation Lab to find out about library, cloud, and shelf life. What do you see as the DPLA's potential? I think the DPLA's potential is to take what libraries have and what libraries have always had, which is the stuff that's good and free and made available to the world, and put it out there just as well as we've done it in the physical world. So let's get our collections out, mounted up on a digital format, and make them available to the people that they're intended to be available to. So that's sort of a broad sweep of what it should be. But I think we have the capability of doing that. We've got great collections. We have great people who work in libraries, and we have a great tradition. So let's just work on how do we do that and how do we get it to the most people. David Weinberger gave us an inside look at library, cloud, and shelf life. So the library cloud is a type of middleware. It's a metadata server that aggregates metadata from libraries and other such institutions about the works, about the usage of the works. Any metadata that we can get our hands on and then makes it available through open APIs and through linked open data. One of the applications that library cloud serves is shelf life. Shelf life's sort of distinguishing feature is that it does indeed use a visual shelf as its first way of browsing. So the idea, two ideas behind that. The first is that shelves are a very familiar metaphor for people who are not used to fancy dancing computers. So that's one idea. The other idea behind it is that physical items get put on a single spot on a shelf. It takes a lot of work to figure out which is the right shelf to put it on. And that's valuable information, but it's also very restricting to only pick one. So books traditionally in libraries get cataloged under more than one subject head. Shelf life takes that idea and allows you to see work on the shelf that is normally being shelved under but also to click on the subject heading and to see that work within a different context, in the context of all the works of that subject heading. Shelf life for DPLA has a sociability layer underneath it, an infrastructure for socialness. So we are currently using the follow metaphor as a Twitter or basically the same thing as Google's circles where a user can follow a work, a library, another user and so forth. Doing so both adds metadata to the system because we can see the patterns of following and the like. It enables us to better tune the results for a user when he or she does a search or is bouncing around. We can surface all that information. Next, we drove over to WGBH to find out about their media library and archives. We're working closely with three scholars to sort of figure out what kind of mechanisms and tools they would want and we found that they really want citation tools, they want annotation tools, they want to see the transcript with the video in order to sync it so that you can search on the transcript, you can read the transcript quicker. They wanted tagging tools, they wanted everything basically. And so we built all these great things for them in order for them to interact with our content and almost as soon as we finished we realized that there were lots of other people also working on similar kinds of tools for scholars to be able to use media and digital media online. And so we sort of took a step backwards and decided what we really ought to be doing is just delivering our content online and trying to get as much content out there and make sure that the way we do deliver that content fits in with all these tools that people are utilizing and building so that people can take our content and then use all these tools in any way that they would want easily. So that's making sure that there's some standards in terms of as you put things out and as you build tools to use those content that they match up. And from where do you source your content? From our own archive. GBH has been producing since 1951, both TV and radio. So we have a very rich collection of media. And so you anticipate the DVLA sourcing from a variety of archives like the Open Vault. How do you feel that they should turn all those separate archives into one cohesive whole? It would be great to have federated search. So if they could first and foremost concentrate on data and collection data so that researchers can find materials and find where the content is that they would be looking for and then I guess secondarily figure out how to allow people to curate content from different kinds of collections and different kinds of sources and put them into some space that they can work with on their own for scholarly works. We have found that once we put things up on Open Vault people suddenly realize what we have stuff. In the past I don't think they even realized that we had stuff. Julia Child's first program was on WGVH, which we have in our archive. So until you put that information out there to say this is what we've got people won't even think about it. So it would be really great if all of this material that exists throughout the country can somehow be exposed online so that people know that it's there and that it even exists, which is fabulous. Finally, we headed downtown to the Boston Public Library to find out about their involvement in the shelf-life collaborative. There's a very strong feeling and a very strong tradition especially in the library world of being a gatekeeper. We have the stuff and we want to in a very nice and friendly way mediate access to it because traditionally librarians and curators have been the experts of these collections allowing them to be put online where essentially you're allowing your public to become the curator and the mediator in a lot of ways. I think that kind of threatens the identity of a traditional librarian role. I personally think that it's really just enhancing the role of a librarian because once you're empowering your users to explore user collections in various ways that we've never even thought of that's actually really exciting for a librarian. I think it's a new skill set that we are currently developing but helping other users discover and mediate different ways to use our collections is pretty exciting. How has the Boston Public Library been working with the Internet Archive to digitize their collections? They have been the vendor that we've hosted here in the library since 2007 to digitize our books. We kind of have two labs here. We have one lab that's run by the BPL that digitizes everything but books. The Internet Archive, because they've invented these devices that this might sound really boring and mundane but they're just very well engineered. It's really hard to digitize a book. Books don't want to lay flat at 180 degrees. They need to be held open at 110 degrees. You have to make sure the book with all its pages can be put back together again and read online. We get all that service for a very low fee and most importantly we own these digital files. There's no corporate entity saying you can or can't do this with those particular files. We've been a real key player in our strategy for digitizing all of our collections because we have so many different types of things. Can you talk a bit about the Boston Public Library's involvement in the Beta Sprint? We have free-to-all carved on our facade here at the library and the idea that this particular Beta Sprint project would be making use of not just bibliographic data describing the collections but the user patterns that exist in these collections is really important and the fact that that's going to become open for developers to build applications upon. So we as librarians and our users can have a deeper understanding of how these collections are used is really important to us. That was just a taste of some of the Beta Sprints in the local Boston area. If you would like to see more videos submitted by Beta Sprinters, visit the link at your screen. If you would like to see the over 60 Beta Sprint proposals submitted from all over the world, visit the link below.