 I'm Carol Palmer, the current lead of the IMLS Digital Collections and Content Project. In this presentation, I'm going to give you background on the work we've done building two digital cultural heritage aggregations. The IMLS DCC initiative began in 2002, with the aim of providing a single point of access to all of the digital content from IMLS National Leadership Grants, and later some LSTA-funded content. With opening history, we took advantage of the DCC's extensive base of history collections, extending well beyond IMLS material and guided by a collection development policy. The IMLS DCC and Opening History offer a wealth of open content for research and learning, much of which has been created with public taxpayer dollars. For our prototype, we have integrated the two resources and added additional collections and features of interest to the DPLA community. Over time, the DCC has broadened the scope of content we aggregate from libraries, museums, archives, and many other kinds of cultural heritage institutions. And we now have collections from almost every state, in part through our work with COSLA, the chief officers of state library agencies, to coordinate some of our collection recruitment at the state level. The foundation of our aggregation is a collection registry and an item-level metadata repository. For the collection registry, we developed a collection-level metadata schema, which is vital to the principles that underpin the development. Much of our work early on focused on metadata processes and quality, and we helped resource developers understand what happens when their metadata becomes part of a large national aggregation. Why, for instance, metadata that functions perfectly well locally can get lost or become meaningless when brought into the mix with a million items. Our work has also been informed by a strong body of research on information seeking in libraries, archives, and digital collections, our own studies of scholarly and interdisciplinary information practices, and our usability testing. From this, we know that collections are key to providing people with important intellectual and navigational context, especially as they explore and evaluate materials. And because institutions invest in and curate collections, they are meaningful organizing units that can bring coherence and functionality to the mass of digital objects. Unlike most search engines and retrieval systems, which tend to lose or obscure the identity of institutions and their collections, we invest in them and exploit them to improve technical capability and the user experience. Retaining rich collection contexts and helping users comprehend the sea of items that lies behind that little search box are technical and conceptual problems, and they become much more difficult as the aggregation grows and becomes more diverse. But at the same time as the aggregation grows, we are able to reveal new national strengths within the collective and bring to the surface small collections that make important contributions to the emergent areas. In addition to our metadata work and our iterative design based on usability tests, several other areas of research and development have been vital in advancing the DCC, including new collection evaluation approaches, metadata relationships research, supplementary search development, and topic modeling to enhance subject access. We're also engaged with Europeana researchers exploring data model extensions and potential for international collection building. To extend access to our collections, we have a program for sharing collections via Flickr and regularly post interesting selections to our blog, Sewing Culture. As we made progress in our sprint this summer, it was very gratifying to see our ideas move forward but also to help our content providers become more aware of the DPLA effort. So on behalf of our entire team, I'd like to thank you for this rare opportunity.