 The Digital Public Library of America connects people to the riches held within America's libraries, archives, museums and other cultural heritage institutions. All of the materials are free and immediately available in digital format. The Knight Foundation invested $1.5 million in the Digital Public Library back in 2015. With me right now is John Bracken from the Digital Public Library of America. So this is, first of all, there are people who are watching this live stream who have no idea what the Digital Public Library is about, so explain. So the Digital Public Library of America was founded about seven years ago. Out of this motivation, the sense of a need that as information and knowledge becomes more and more digital, and as we're engaging with information increasingly through digital means, it's vital that the civic institutions that have been the core of our society are at the table. And it's essential that as information becomes more digital, it becomes more accessible, not less accessible. And we saw a risk and we were afraid that as more commercial digital platforms became the main way we were engaging with information, if we didn't step up to the table and build our own platform and engage more directly, we would miss out. So what can one find in the Digital Public Library? Is this just a repository for eBooks? It is a repository for eBooks. It is images, it is collections. Right now we're pulling together a collection focused on a set of collections with partners across the country, focused on African American women in voting, both inside and outside of the suffrage movement that's supported by Pivotal Ventures. We're doing a national eBook initiative with partners like New York Public Library and Lyrisis and 200 public libraries across the country, making sure that libraries have their own platform for accessing eBooks. We're also publishing materials, so we see a real need to make public documents available and easier for people to consume. So with our partners at the Internet Archive, we published the Impeachment Papers for instance, a collection of publicly available documents around the investigation around President Trump and the Mueller Report. Okay, so is this something that, how does this work on a local and national level? Do you go out to all of these different libraries that exist in our communities and say what parts of your system can we help you digitize or what do you do with it? So everything we do is in partnership. So we have a national coalition of 4,000 institutions across the US that work at a state-based level, so we have 43 state-based partners right now, 43 and growing. And here in Miami, we convened on Monday a group of 70 library and technology and journalist leaders really to focus on public libraries and making sure that public libraries have a common platform to ensure that we're taking full advantage and are making the transition of the digital age in the way that American society needs right now. Okay, so someone's watching saying, listen, we still need physical library spaces as community conveners, right? So how does this digitizing help? Is it about increasing the relevance of those spaces, seeing those resources that we might have forgotten? Yes, completely. I mean, one of, I think the really important moments we're in is how do we make sure we access our memories, we access the archival moments that we have in our lives and make them pertinent and relevant to these intense debates we're having today about the future of American democracy and the combination of leveraging digital in physical place and taking advantage of the fact that there are seven times as many libraries in the U.S. as McDonald's, which is such a unique value and that we're the most trusted institution in the country right now and that we are staffed by professionals who have been trained in information curation and seeking and sharing quality information. Those values make our institutions, both the physical presence and the digital presence, really, really vital. You know, what's, I know you're more plugged into the sort of analog library community as well. What has happened to libraries in America? It seems, again, this is from an outsider. When I was a young immigrant, it was this place of awe. Wait a minute, wow, you just trust me to return all these books? This is crazy, right? I mean, I came from a country that didn't have that. And then later on, what I found was it was also a place where people would literally get out of the cold or get out of the heat. When I lived in Dallas, it was a place where people would escape the heat in the summer when I lived elsewhere. And then this is, okay, so if you're homeless, this is a place for you. If you're a young immigrant, this is a place for you. But somewhere along, and if you have kids, this is a place for you. What has happened to how we perceive libraries, how we fund libraries, how we see them as their role in society? That's a good book. How much time you got? You know, Hari, I think your experience is a lived experience across the country right now. I think the things that we're excited about is there is a set of young library leaders coming in who are focused on ensuring that in this moment of transition into a digital world, we are robustly at the table and thinking about what the needs of American society is. And that runs the gamut from being a place for refuge from environmental crises to immigrant services. We had Kansas City Public Library at our meeting. They do citizenship ceremonies at their library. They host them. They make it a big civic experience in Philadelphia. Healthcare provision, food provision. We had Cleveland Public Library that's done a lot around providing food for the hungry. It's an undervalued resource. I mean, I don't think that people think of, right? When they think of city services, they think of police, that they've got fire, they think of maybe whatever, parks and recreation, but they forget that there's this public good that exists. And I think it's also an under-resourced value, societal value. That's right. And I think as you go to some of the events and listen in at the conversations here, libraries come up often as a potential collaborator because of the strengths we have, because of our physical locations. And one of our missions is to help make sure that people see that value and invest in that value, which is why we're really excited that Knight Foundation just made such an investment. Yeah, and you just got another round of funding from the Knight Foundation. We just announced a grant from Knight Foundation this week to really double down on our work with public libraries. We recently received a grant from Pivotal Ventures, which is Melinda Gates's operation to focus on making sure that memories, especially of underrepresented communities, are circulated and are really focused on. And one of the things we wanted to make sure we do is become a partner and an ally for marginalized communities and community-based archives so that they have a pathway to tell their stories as well. You know, speaking of storytelling, here we are surrounded by journalism organizations, community foundations. How do you encourage people to basically find stories that exist in these archives, that exist in these libraries, right? Are you been sitting here by team meetings? No, I haven't. This is exactly, this is our core, one of our core focuses for this year is how do we make sure that we enable others to find the stories and piece them together. And as you know, because you're a storyteller, the way people get information and share information is through stories. And we have lots of items and lots of things that we point to. And so one of the things we're focused on is making sure that people are able to create their own collections, whether it's teachers or students or just researchers. One way we're trying to do that is working through Wikimedia and Wikimedia Foundation as a partner of ours and Wikipedia, making sure that the 35 million items that our partners have made available digitally, that that's available for use by Wikipedians because we know that Wikipedia increasingly is the first stop on the internet for so many researchers. All right, so what was that said? Seven times as many libraries as McDonald's in America. All right, John Bracken, we will leave you on that. Thank you very much. Thanks so much.