 I'm going to welcome up to the stage, if I might, the first employee of the Digital Public Library of America, which is Emily Gore. Emily is the DPLA Director of Content, which is incredibly exciting. She's going to be joined by John Butler of the University of Minnesota Library, someone who has been involved from the very beginning as well of the project. I'm Mary Marlonaro from the University of Kentucky Libraries, and they will lead the session on the Digital Hubs pilot projects. Emily, over to you. Thank you. So you've heard a lot already about the mention about the Digital Hubs pilot project. I'm excited to have the chance to tell you a little bit more and for you to see more of the content and to learn more about what's going to be available in April and beyond from a couple of the pilot members. So I'm going to give you a little bit of the overview, and then I'm going to turn it over to both Mary and John to tell you more about the content in Kentucky and Minnesota as partners in this effort. So you've already heard mention of the Digital Hubs pilot project. We just recently launched, thanks to the wonderful funding of the three funders mentioned already. We launched in September. We had our first meeting, our kickoff meeting, recently at the Berkman Center a couple of weeks ago, where all the partners were present and we got a great start and began our planning process and working on our budgets and moving forward. The goal of the Digital Hubs pilot project is to build on the infrastructure that we already have through two types of hubs, both service hubs and content hubs. The folks you'll be hearing from today and what you'll be hearing a lot about are service hubs. Content hubs are those large content providers that already exist and we'll be identifying those as we move forward in the project. So the approach for the pilot is to work with seven states and one region at this point. The Mountain West is one of the regions that we're working with, which represents several states and those seven states are the service hubs and then we'll also identify a similar number of content hubs, large content providers that we'll be working with as part of the project. Again, we're grateful for the funding from both NEH, IMLS and the Knight Foundation. So just to show you visually a little bit what this would look like. So we have state collaboratives. Many of these collaboratives pull together content from institutions throughout their state. So all different kinds of institutions, libraries, archives, museums, historical societies, you name it, small institutions are represented. So we have several states or other collaboratives. We have some existing large content hubs and they will all feed into the DPLA for our initial launch. So some advantages to this approach, why we're doing this. We've already talked about the fact that there's some existing infrastructure. Susan talked about IMLS's investment in particular. Through the years, many of these hubs have been funded with federal funding or LSTA funding or otherwise large grants have been received by these institutions to really fund these collaborative efforts. Almost 40 states or right at 40 states in our country have some sort of collaborative organization. They vary in different structure and staffing and whether or not they have a central repository or whether or not the repository is distributed. But we do have about 40 states that actually do have existing collaboratives. So the goal is to build off of that existing infrastructure that we already have. These hubs also have aggregation services and metadata services. So you heard about the concept of the Geek Squad. Many of these people already, they have these people in place. We all love our metadata geeks, don't we? People who go out and really massage metadata. I'm on a call on Sheila McAllister from the University of Georgia. I call her a metadata geek all the time. She's one of our hub public participants. She really knows her metadata. So she works with content from all over Georgia and massages metadata and makes it all work together. So they aggregate this content, they pull it together from all over the state so that they can cross-search it and it works together. We have many diverse institutions represented in the state and regional collaborations. From academic libraries, many of them are centered at academic libraries. The two you'll hear from today are both centered at academic libraries. Often at state-sponsored universities where it's part of their mission to serve the greater good, the greater public. But not only do those academic libraries participate, but they work with archives, they work with museums, they work with historical societies. They work with public libraries to get their content online. That content is diverse. It includes photographs, newspapers, manuscripts, books, newspapers, oral histories, audio files. We have wonderful streaming video files. Again, I'll use the University of Georgia as an example. They have the Civil Rights Digital Library, which has lots of video footage from the Civil Rights era. The University of Kentucky has a huge oral history collection, which I'm sure Mary will tell you more about. And the other advantage to this approach is that it limits the number of direct relationships that the DPLA will have. So it would be impossible for us to have one-to-one relationships, especially with the fact that I'm the only staff member at this point. I'm sure we will grow, absolutely. But the limited number of one-to-one direct relationships is important. So having these aggregators building on this infrastructure that already exists is obviously very important. So who are these folks? The Mountain West Digital Library includes Utah, Nevada, and soon Arizona content from Arizona memory. Sandra McIntyre is here in the audience representing the Mountain West Digital Library. The Digital Commonwealth is a collaborative in Massachusetts. Amy Ryan is here. The Digital Library of Georgia, I've mentioned Sheila McAllister already, is here representing the Digital Library of Georgia. Kentucky, Mary Malinaro on the stage. Minnesota, John Butler also on the stage. The Oregon Digital Library and the South Carolina Digital Library round up the last two of our pilots. So you can see we're geographically distributed, and we are also distributed in the way that we do our work. Many of us are... Some of them are centralized hubs. Everything is done at one location. Other hubs are very distributed in their models. So we have great diversity, and we're all learning already from each other. We have an active listserv already of these seven pilots and we're sharing so much information among each other. I think it's going to be a great learning experience, and we hope to share a lot with other potential hubs so that we can really truly build a model. So what are the service hubs offering? So they're going to offer a full menu of standardized digital services to local institutions. That would include new digitization. So obviously they have a lot of digital content already, but they'll also be digitizing new content. Metadata concentrations, those Geek Squad efforts, working with people to make sure that metadata standards are being followed and implemented. Data aggregation, pulling all that stuff together, getting that metadata in one pot where we can capture it through DPLA. Storage services. Obviously when you digitize material, you have to have appropriate storage for that material, so that's part of the funding as well. And very importantly, locally hosted community outreach programs, often in conjunction with the public libraries, all of these folks are making contacts, or already have contacts in most cases with their local public libraries and working with them to really build community engagement platforms. And last but not least, they're all going to be building an exhibit. We talked about, the last panel talked about the stories and how important stories were to all of us. And the exhibits in particular, we know that we're going to, we're going to synthesize, we're going to pull a lot of this content together around exhibits and really tell some rich stories. Some of the exhibits we're going to be building include stories of civil rights and activism, stories of prohibition. We have Kentucky of course, to talk about prohibition. Native Americans is one of the topics. We're talking about the Great Depression and the CCC. So many wonderful topics are going to be part of the exhibit building for the launch of the DPLA. In addition to, of course, the exhibit, we're building with Europeana on immigration. So we'll have a rich exhibit display when we launch in April. So again, I mentioned the content hubs. They're yet to be determined, but they're large content holders. I've given you a few examples of who those content holders might be. People like Harvard University, who's already made the commitment to be a part of the DPLA, who holds a great amount of digital content. The National Archives and Records Administration, the Smithsonian, the Hathi Trust, large content holders. We envision being content hubs. So that's one of the, one of the next phases we'll move to very quickly is to identify those partners and to begin to harvest their information as well. So just to give you a brief overview of the timeline of what we're talking about, we're just getting underway and the project has a two-year timetable starting right now. Now through April 2013, obviously we know that that's a very important date. That's our next time we get together to really show what we've done. We're going to prepare current metadata and content, content previews, so images or SNPs, those kinds of things, and what some might refer to as thumbnails now. But not just images, you know, for, you'd have clips for audio and video as well. For harvest, we're going to harvest existing metadata, the metadata for the digital content that these people already have, from the content and service hubs, and we're going to make it available to the initial launch of DPLA. We're talking about numerous objects. Every hub has at least 100,000 objects. Many have many more. Kentucky itself has over 800,000 newspapers. So there's a lot of content to be made available. And again, they'll be developing exhibitions as a part of the release for April. And throughout the next two years, we're going to do new digitization. We're going to have new metadata done for that digitization, aggregate that content, and adding these new services. And for many of these hubs, that includes adding new partners. John's going to tell you a little bit about potential partners that he might add through aggregation. Many people are envisioning, the Mountain West is adding the state of Arizona, the former Arizona Memory Project into its regional collaboration. So many of these people will be expanding their current infrastructure and targeted community engagement, in particular with the night communities. So without much more from me, I'm actually going to turn it over to Mary and John and let them tell you about the exciting work that they're going to do in Kentucky and Minnesota as part of this project and let you learn a little bit about the wonderful rich content and partners that they have in their current infrastructure and how they envision the DPLA moving this even a step further. So without further ado, I'm going to turn it over to Mary. Thank you.