 So this first session is going to be a series of commentaries from some of the people who have been making the DPLA happen in all important and extraordinary and actually each quite different ways Including one little surprise announcement which we're looking forward to along the way I'm going to turn first to Doran Weber who is the vice president at the Alford P. Sloan Foundation and in fact the vice chair of our steering committee who has been really from the start both The the largest scale funder of the project, but also a hugely important substantive contributor Doran Weber Thank You John. Hi everybody It's a pleasure to be here on behalf of the Sloan Foundation for this third plenary But first Midwestern plenary on the creation of a digital public library of America DPLA seeks to be the largest and most open digital network of libraries Universities archives and museums in the US and ultimately to link with other nations into the largest global network So it's fitting we meet in the Harold Washington Library Center Listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the largest public library building in the world and named for man who broke down barriers and built coalitions It's great to see such an impressive group of leaders and experts and students here people who care about Libraries and education and shared knowledge and community and how technology can help us achieve these goals Welcome to our new board who ray to our new funders And thank you to the DPLA steering committee and to the DPLA secretariat at the Berkman Center So skillfully overseen by John Paul free even in absentia Who would have known John has a day job at Phillips Academy and to more and Rebecca and Kenny and that amazing Berkman rat pack And a special thank you to our host Brian Vannon his team at the Chicago Public Library I usually begin by talking about how much hard work and how many challenges remain and that is still true Within six months DPLA must launch Operations and prove that it can provide an essential service for libraries and citizens across the nation Facilitating a new on-ramp for scientific and cultural knowledge that does not presently exist And it must demonstrate a working technical prototype It must showcase some great content that people have not seen before and offer a mechanism for more to come or respecting copyright restrictions and budgetary constraints It must draw from and cater to small libraries rural libraries and public libraries I'm also meeting the needs and standards of the great research libraries and universities It must search for and hire a brilliant new executive director and a startup staff set up an office and establish an initial budget and Structure it must raise millions of dollars a year build a community and support a major Digitization effort that require at least a decade and hundreds of millions of dollars And then it must link with the rest of the world into a global network Any one of these tasks would be tough enough and together. They are truly daunting and yet based on all the impressive progress to date I can safely say that things have never looked so promising Nor so plausible for a DPLA We have come a long way in a very short time and anyone who attended yesterday's sessions on the digital hubs Pilot on technical development on the future of DPLA could feel this palpable sense of progress The dream of DPLA is now poised to become a reality or at least an initial working prototype with a huge fan base The Sloan Foundation has been pursuing this overall 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 Lyrisis The Medical Heritage Library among others While we gave these groups millions of dollars and got very impressive results Perhaps no small grant has had a bigger impact than the $36,000 Officing grant we gave to the Radcliffe Institute for an October 2010 meeting hosted by Robert Darnton The DPLA was born at this meeting where participants agreed to work together toward the creation of and I'm gonna quote this 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 informant empower everyone in the current and future generations That meeting in that sentence, which I personally fought very hard for generated enormous excitement and energy in December 2010 six weeks later Sloan gave the Berkman Center at Harvard a planning grant to act as a secretary for this new effort provisionally called Digital Public Library of America and by January blue ribbon steering committee was formed and an active wiki and Discussion lists are created in March 2011 the first meeting on content of scope one of six work streams was held at Harvard's Berkman Center in April DPLA secured additional support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Open Society Institute in May We held a workshop in Amsterdam on link data and interoperability and also met with the European about ways we might work together We also announced a beta sprint to develop a working technical prototype in June We held another workshop the Library of Congress on technical architecture and Sloan approved 836 thousand dollar grants of the Berkeley Law Center to support the legal work stream of the DPLA initiative by developing solutions to copyright law obstacles facing public library initiatives and Jennifer Urban's wonderful paper on fair use and Pam Samuelson's op-eds on the DPLA and Dave Hanson's white papers are all part of the result of this by July over 40 series submissions for the beta sprint were received in a September an expert review panel selected the most promising candidates In October 2011 the DPLA was officially launched at a plenary meeting in Washington DC hosted by the National Archives The Sloan Foundation announced a 2.5 million grant for this effort the Arcadia Foundation matched us with another 2.5 million dollars and we started a grassroots process to build a work plan for a national digital library system That was almost exactly a year ago And in the interim the DPLA has achieved every milestone and met every goal in a remarkable and I believe historical example of Organizational creation and development. They are totally on track on schedule and on budget They are Excuse of an accurate kicking butt, and I think we should give them just a round of applause before I go on You know as a funder people always promise you a lot of things But they don't always deliver in this case is a wonderful example I'm going to just mention some highlights DPLA has held three major public plenary meetings and Nine major workshops involving the six work streams with an average of 120 members each That's on the work streams. The plenaries have been about 300 people DPLA has grown from 40 people to 1200 volunteers and participants It has developed an active website listservant wiki It is engaged with the public through numerous presentations and talks have been the subject of major national press coverage DPLA has developed an open-source back-end metadata platform that allows developers to gather metadata about content and collections made accessible Through the DPLA and to build applications on top of this It has held hackathons to spur developers and hired iFactory design the front-end website It has created library cloud a metadata server that makes library information freely available and has seeded the system with an Extraordinary bounty of 12 million metadata records released by Harvard University to DPLA and to the world for free reuse It has started the digital hubs pilot offering the building blocks of a national digital access network with Complementary service hubs seven pilot efforts in seven states will aggregate data from local institutions and feed it into the DPLA network and Content hubs that drawn the larger positors of digital content that already exist allowing rapid scale-up To support the digital hubs DPLA secured another two point two five million dollars in support from three great partners NEH night and IMLS Finally DPLA has established itself as an independent entity in Delaware selected five new members of an eventual seven member board of directors and Begun the search for new executive director This outstanding performance has generated enormous momentum and won many new adherents the digital public library of America is a big bold idea for a digital age a Collaborative public-private effort to support and complement our existing library system and to enhance to enhance access to knowledge for people everywhere We are on the verge of an historical transformation and it's great to watch it grow and evolve and to be a small part of it Thank you for coming and for believing in this vision and for helping us make it into a new reality Doran, thank you There are several people without whom we would not be here and I count Bob and more and Alongside you for that but we're truly without your vision and support and the Sloan Foundation's Financing we would absolutely not be here today And please forget what Doran just said about the two point two five million dollars because you're going to hear about that in a surprise announcement shortly You cleared oh you did okay, that's good George said okay