 Hi, my name is John Pulfrey, and I'm coming to you from Cambridge, Massachusetts. I'm speaking today as the chairman of the steering committee of the Digital Public Library of America Initiative. And I wanted just to give an update generally on the project. This is now May 2011. And to share some general observations about where we stand and where the discussion is toward a DPLA and some basic ideas that we've been kicking around as a steering committee and as a secretariat here at the Berkman Center at Harvard University where the initiative is being supported from an administrative perspective. So here we are in May 2011. And just to recap where we've come from, a group of people met in Radcliffe's institute just down the street here in Cambridge, Massachusetts in October and came to agreement around one sentence, which was an aspiration to build toward a digital public library of America. We then a few months later raised a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Doran Weber, vice president there, has been supporting this initiative, gave a grant to the Berkman Center to start a planning process to set up a steering committee, which we have and a secretariat. We set up an online wiki and a discussion list and so forth. And we've built out a quite wonderful steering committee of people who represent a broad range of interests from public and academic libraries, from government, and from many aspects of the library world. And we're just thrilled to have such an amazing steering committee helping to guide this work. We also had a meeting in early February here in Cambridge, Massachusetts where we talked about content and scope. And we worked from there on a four-page document called a concept note, which is up on the DPLA wiki, which you can get by using any major search engine, Bing or Google or what have you, to access it. And from there we have also had a meeting most recently in Amsterdam this past week, which was a quite wonderful conversation with those who have been leading the Europeana effort in the parallel context of Europe. And it's amazing what they've gotten done over a couple of years. They've also encountered many of the issues that we will surely encounter in the DPLA process. And it's really quite fortunate that they're willing to share their views with us and some of the lessons learned, and that we have the opportunity in some of these areas to be a fast follower, even though, of course, we will chart our own course forward. We also spent a lot of time talking with our partners in Europe about how we might link up these efforts. If you think about the notion of a human knowledge project with some of our colleagues, Eva, among others from UVA have been talking about, that might be the entire global effort toward making available the cultural and scientific heritage of humanity. After that level, you might think about different regional or national approaches. We've seen the success of the South Koreans in their national digital library effort. We've now seen the Europeana effort, which is bridging many of the national and regional European efforts. And in some respects, we hope that the digital public library of America might lead to the United States version of that same thing. And if one thinks about these parallel efforts, we should think also about how they will interoperate with one another. And that was one of the key takeaways from our conversation in Amsterdam, which was to think about at what level might we have interoperability between these different projects that have very simple and similar aims. And one of the areas that we've been exploring is at the data level, to think about linked data between these different projects where we might identify things, for instance, the metadata or the records associated with a given object. It might be a text. It might be audio. It might be video. It might be audio forth. And figure out a way that we might interconnect these different activities at this data layer. And I think if we are getting the design right from the beginning, we have this principle of interoperability at a certain level. We'll be able to innovate in different ways and we'll be able to draw upon our cultures in different ways, but also ensure that these efforts are linked in ways that are consistent with the basic principles of the internet and the basic principles of how people will want to be using this information from different cultures. And I'm very bullish about what we learned and the very positive energy that we got from our conversations with the Europeana team this past week in Amsterdam. So that's where we've been. And where we're headed is over the next several months to have, I hope, a stepped up planning process where we move forward with something we've announced today, which is a beta sprint where we're encouraging people to undertake an effort to help us understand what a DPLA might be. And roughly speaking, we're hoping in the next few weeks people will send us statements of interest on that. You can find more information on our website. And then to submit to us the steering committee by September 1st, their entries in this beta sprint context. I've also recorded a separate video specifically on the beta sprint, which I'd encourage you to watch if you're interested. We then hope to have another meeting that will take place in June, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities in Washington, DC to do some more technical work in terms of thinking through the scope. We will then be having a big public event, hopefully in early fall. This is contingent on raising some more money and so forth. But we are very hopeful that we will have a public event that will take place probably in October, probably in Washington, DC. And the idea would be, among other things, this would be a moment where we will have those who have submitted to the beta sprint. Some of them have been selected by the steering committee and an outside review group to present their ideas for what a DPLA could be. And then the overall game plan from there is, roughly speaking, an 18-month process to get to a prototype, an actual operating digital public library of America in the wilds of the internet. And we would love to see that happen, say, in spring of 2013. Obviously, there are many challenges between here and there. There are many things that will have to get done through a lot of hard work. We hope this will continue to be a deeply collaborative process where all the members of the steering committee and a very broad community of people interested in libraries and technology and public information will come together and will, in fact, contribute in many different complementary ways over the next couple of years to build toward the vision of a digital public library of America. And I hope very much that you will join us in that effort, whether it's simply being on the mailing list that we have, the DPLA discussion list, or participating through the wiki, or coming to some of these meetings that we hope to have in the coming years, or in fact, somehow contributing directly through content or metadata, or otherwise, in making a digital public library of America reality. Thank you so much for taking the time to watch this. I'm John Palfrey, signing off for the steering committee of the Digital Public Library of America.