 I'm going to do a little bit of a walkthrough of what we're doing at the Digital Public Library of America. And I'll talk a lot about what's happening, what's going to happen, and then also, at the end, make a call to involve everyone in this room, really, in the DPLA, because it is, in fact, a community effort. DPLA itself is really small. There's just 11 of us in the central office, or a tiny little organization. We rely on our community and collaborators here in California. California Digital Library is joining us and places all across the country to become contributing institutions and to become our partners in this mission. So let me always like to start with this slide for folks who don't know a lot about the DPLA, reduces our mission to these three things. First of all, we are a portal, so we actually do have a presence on the web at dp.la. We have a nice short URL. You can dial it up right now on your phone or tablet or laptop if you haven't visited it before. And that's where you can access all the material from all of our contributing institutions. We do a lot of fancy things there in terms of visualizing the collection and making it easy to use, and I'll show you some of those methods in just a second. We also, and I think this is a little bit more behind the scenes, but just as important, we are a technology platform. And that's just a fancy way of saying that we really make all of our data available for other people to use in many different ways. I'll show you some examples tonight. But I think that the creativity there and what people are able to do that we can't do ourselves on our website is incredibly important to our mission. It means that people can integrate the dp.la into the classroom, into apps, into all kinds of websites, into art projects, into book projects, into many kinds of things. They can use our platform to enable new forms of digital library applications. So we're really excited about what's going on there and what could come in the future. And then finally, and I'll talk a little bit less about this tonight, but we are also an advocate for a strong public option. We're standing here in a really important building, a building that provides access to all citizens, free of charge. And so we like to join hands with other organizations, other institutions to try to maintain that strong public option and public access to our shared cultural heritage in the 21st century. It's not guaranteed that we will have that kind of access and broad access to all material culture. And so we do work very hard on that front as well. So let me give you a quick whirlwind tour of the site if you haven't been there before. How many people actually have been to our website before? Okay, great. Bookmark it, make it your home page. Wake up every morning, see what's new at the dp.la. So this is our home page. And I think what you can tell right away is that we do have in fact a Google style single search box there that accesses the 8.4 million items in our collection. That ticker goes up from week to week. But if you want to just do a random search, you can go ahead and try that. What we also do that's probably also apparent from the site is that we do provide multiple pathways into the library itself. Different people like to search our collection in different ways. And we try to enable that I think in very creative ways and innovative ways. Some of them are textual, some of them are visual, others as you'll see involve timelines. I think the map is probably the most interesting because if you actually go to a place like Google, you will get your 10 blue text links and some descriptive information about whatever keywords you search for. But if you go to our map, you actually find the locations of the items you're looking for. We have a photograph of a cotton gin from Georgia. We will actually pinpoint that on a map of where that item has come from. I'll talk a little bit more later about how exactly we do that. But it means that you can browse America's collections actually on a map of America here. We'll zoom in here using the magic of my clicker. We'll zoom in here to Northern California. And as you see, as we zoom in, these little bubbles that started out as 300,000 items, etc., they start breaking apart. And you can go all the way down to the block level and then find items from your neighborhood that are in the DPLA from any of our contributing institutions. So it's a really, I think, unique way of accessing this kind of large collection just as a historian. I mean, I really, I wish I had had this because I did a lot of dusty archival work in the more traditional phase of my career. And this would have been incredibly helpful, but I think it's not just helpful for scholars and researchers. It's helpful for the general public that might just want to see what's new from their region in the collection. We also have a timeline. This is super fun on an iPad or other touch tablet. You can just scroll with your finger back and forth through time. It's a very minority report if you want to do that. And you can go from there and actually pull up a specific year. Here I've actually done a search for San Francisco. We have 26,794 items from San Francisco. And I've dialed into 1844. We have 72 items from 1844 from San Francisco, just like that, just a couple clicks away. We also have a bookshelf. So we crossed the two million book barrier a month ago. And so we have over two million books. We have a special interface for our books that presents them in an endless vertical stack that you can scroll through. It also pulls up images that are related from our image collection to a specific book using descriptive data about those books. And the books, in fact, are represented as they are on the shelf in their rough sizes. They're length, height, physical dimensions so you can get a rough sense of how big a book is. For those who don't want to wade through millions and millions of items, we actually have a set of exhibitions. Those are growing. Actually, this year we're going to make a big push to have even more of them. But we have about a dozen up right now on different themes in American history, American culture, ranging from the Great Depression to civil rights movement to America's parks and ecology. I really encourage you, if you haven't been to DPLA before, what goes on in these exhibits is that our member institutions will band together and will have librarians or curators come in and pull out the best images, the best maps, the best materials, just a couple dozen items from the sea that we have from multiple institutions. This one I really like, if you want to start with just one, this one on the gold rush is really terrific. There are some incredible photographs from the 19th century, from multiple collections, and I really encourage you to maybe start there. We also do exhibitions internationally, and I'll come back to this in a moment, but one of the wonderful things about working in the digital realm is that we can actually unify collections internationally. So we have this incredible American collection, but there are also sister projects going on across the world that we speak with regularly. In Europe there's a project called Europeana, and we did this exhibition with them on emigration from Europe and immigration to the United States using our combined collections from both sides of the pond. Okay, so let me talk about actually how we bring the special collections together. What's I think again unique, just to underline this, is I did a search on what we have in San Francisco here, and so here's an image that I thought would be from San Francisco, from an archive around here. It's actually from New York Public Library, has some great photographs. I did some further searches. It turns out that the University of Texas has a great map collection of San Francisco. Brigham Young University, which is part of our Mountain West Digital Library, which is one of our hubs, and I'll talk about this technology, the hubs in just a second. They also have incredible photographs of Chinatown. Who knew? Here in San Francisco at Brigham Young University, we have them described. We can find them really easily. These are all side-by-side for the first time in the DPLA. And that's really, I think the magic of this is that all these collections for the first time are really lined up together in one place. It's one-stop shopping. Again, you should bookmark it, breakfast every day. Start your searching there. It's all in one place. And actually, if you just pull back a little bit, I even click through a bit more about institutions that are part of DPLA that have one or more items relating to San Francisco. And this is just the first page. There's actually three pages of institutions. This is just the first page. There's 30 institutions on this page. So let's say 90, close to 100 institutions from across the United States have material about San Francisco that now we can find for the first time and put all in one place on DP.LA. So that's really, really exciting. So let me talk about the process of how this all comes together, where the content actually comes from. We have what we call hubs. It's not maybe a perfect name, but it's the name we use for them. And our hubs are kind of our nodes or our little parts of the web across the United States that act as contributing sources for us. And these are big places. Some of them are what we call content hubs, and these are probably very easy to understand. They include places like the California Digital Library that might have a million or more items. To donate, we have big federal institutions, Smithsonian National Archives. We have big public libraries, New York Public Library, Boston Public Library, and others as well, USC and California. I probably don't have all the California institutions that are these hubs. But these are big content hubs. They're places that have a lot of material that they can donate directly to the DPLA, and we have a kind of parallel one-to-one relationship with them. Where I think DPLA really shines is that we don't want to just be the big places. Yes, we want the stuff from the Smithsonian. We have 800,000 items from the Smithsonian from all their museums. We have panda pictures and all that stuff, and that's wonderful. But we also want small and mid-sized places from across the country. If we really are going to be a library of America, it means that we really need to get materials from the smallest collections as well as the largest collections. And the way we do that is through these service hubs. So these service hubs, here are some of them right here, act to go around their state or region to make sure that materials from the small and mid-sized places can get online in the same ways that they can for the big institutions. So just this one on the top left, Minnesota Digital Library, for instance, has gone out in a van across Minnesota. They've brought online 160 collections and counting, some of them incredibly small. Goodhue County Historical Society, which added a couple hundred photographs from the 19th century from small towns in the region, Morris, Minnesota. We have that because of Minnesota Digital Library. We can make sure through these service hubs that any collection that's part of America's culture, the broad range of America's cultures, can be part of DPLA through these service hubs. Here's the portal to Texas history that that map came from, and they've brought online a few hundred thousand items from, again, these smaller and mid-sized places as well as some big places like University of Texas. So the water metaphor that I really like to use for DPLA that I hope will stick with you is that we go from these ponds of content, some of them quite small, up through tributaries to the lakes that are our hubs, content and service hubs, and then through rivers, the ocean that is really the sea that is DPLA. It's the complete aggregate of all of these collections. This is the current map as of this morning. You can see the dots represent either hubs in development or content hubs, so specific institutions. And then the red maroon are service hubs or partners of service hubs. We actually have a service hub in Mountain West that covers half-dozen states at this point. So this is our map of where the hubs are, and you'll notice that there are still gaps. There are still gaps, and I'll come back to this at the end, but the number one priority in our strategic plan that came out this morning is to make sure we have coast-to-coast coverage, that we have a service hub available to every collection in every state and every region of the U.S., and I'm very confident that over the next three years we are going to ramp up and do that. We have some already waiting in the pipeline that's going to happen this year. But that is a real key goal for us as well as adding on specific collections, content hubs. We started in April 2013, actually on the anniversary of Paul Revere's ride, April 18, 2013, with a little over two million items starting off with six state service hubs, which represented 500 contributing institutions total. And as of this morning, when I got on the plane, we were at 8.4 million items with 12 service hubs. Again, one of those hubs actually covers, I think, five states in the Mountain West, 1,300 contributing institutions. So we've quadrupled the number of items. We've almost tripled the number of contributing institutions, and it's really exciting to just be sprinting along like this. We're kind of tired. We have a lot of coffee in Boston. But to get to this level this quickly has really been wonderful and really is a testament not to us at headquarters but really to what's going on around the country of people realizing that this is a great idea, wanting to join in and getting their institutions to hop on board. I want to emphasize really the diversity of the collection. Louise actually brought up a stat that I don't have a slide for, but it truly is incredible. We did a census of languages that materials are written in in the collection, and it's now over 400 different languages are represented in the DPLA. It's really a truly remarkable number. We also have diversity in terms of the kinds of institutions that are contributing. So, yeah, you can sort of read this probably from where you are. I might need to get out my glasses. We have materials obviously from archives, museums, historical societies, university libraries and public libraries. Actually public libraries are our number one donor at this point. I think when we launched a lot of people thought maybe this is a university project and I'm like a kind of a university guy. But no, we really have a very diverse collection now. We have materials actually from government agencies, from psychopedias corporate archives. We have some stuff coming online from corporate archives. There's just a real wide range of things. Independent libraries actually, we're making a big push on. So again, we do want to make sure that we have a broad spectrum. We're also thinking about that diversity along multiple axes, things like languages, things like item types. In the strategic plan, we talk about really pushing to get more audio visual material. Right now we have a lot of books. We have a lot of photographs and that's great. But we love some time-based media, some film, some music if we can get it. There's obviously a lot of copyright issues around these things. But I do consider them part of the full range of human expression. And so we really do want to make sure that we have a way to get those materials in as well. For institutions that join us, they see these tremendous spikes in traffic. And that happens because they may have put their material online, but as I think we all know, when you get something online, you make a website, people don't necessarily come to it and it's hard to find. And what DPLA can do is we're not just aggregating the content. We're actually aggregating a huge audience and a very energetic audience from all levels, K through 12, college, lifelong learners, amateur enthusiasts, family historians. All those people are coming to DPLA to find these resources again in one-stop shopping. And that means that we've doubled the traffic for some of our partners right away upon joining because we pull that audience together. And we also work very hard to make sure that the descriptive information about what they're donating into the DPLA is very solid and will be findable within our discovery systems. So let me get to that point. I won't get too nerdy on the data, but the data really is important. We run a giant bunch of servers and they store data. And what's really important to us here is that we do describe things accurately and also that we normalize or sort of make regular all the data that's coming in. If you think about it, there's 1,300 institutions. We have to shoehorn all of that into a common data standard. And there's probably very savvy people in the audience that know what I'm talking about here, but it's a very complicated behind-the-scenes process that's very important to us. Means that you'll be able to find those things again in parallel, those things from New York Public and the University of Texas and bring them young all in one place because they're all using the same data standard once they're in DPLA. We also make this real effort to enhance the data, and we're going to be doing a lot more of this. We talk about this in the strategic plan, but we're looking to really enhance the data even more in the coming years. One of the things obviously that's sort of a signature of what we do is we do try to geocode or provide latitude and longitudinal coordinates for items in the collection. This is University of Southern California's collection. They put in about 270,000 items. We spent a week geocoding those, not by hand, but with a lot of computers and a lot of technology, probably which is based here somewhere near here, but to try to find out where they are. If we had postcards or 5,000 postcards in this collection, it's a really wonderful collection of LA postcards. We really did try to find where those street corners were, where these different things are as best we can. We're going to do even more of that with what's called link data. If you have any computer scientists or software developers in the audience, they probably know that there's a kind of movement to add even more data to describe items. There are things that we're adding in right now, like this is from GeoNames. If you go to geonames.org, it's this incredible international system that is providing essentially a social security number, a unique ID for every building in the world. Public Library of San Francisco has a GeoNames ID of 538-5097. You didn't realize that's where we're standing. You can call SFPL that from now on. What we're going to try to do is slot in those numbers. We actually have a software and data person working on this right now into all the records that you can find out anything that's related to San Francisco Public Library, whether it's an article or a painting or a photograph, anything that we get from any of our partners, if we can tag it with this number, then we can associate it with all the other things related to us, even if the words San Francisco Public Library aren't in the actual descriptive information about that item. So this link data is really exciting to us. I mentioned the platform and I want to talk about that for a few minutes. We have what's called an API or an Application Programming Interface, which is just a fancy way to say that we make our data available, broadly available to any software developer who wants to come in and pull out slices, particular records, anything that matches certain criteria. You can grab that stuff and go and put it wherever you want, on a device, on a watch, anything that you want to do. We have an app library. It's not as large as Apple's working on it. If there's any developers in the audience, I'd love for you to check out our API and make an app on this. But you can see a lot of you go to the app library and there's multiple pages you can page through. You'll see there's a lot of different kinds of apps that people are making use of DPLA's data to do new things. I'll just show a few of them. So here's our Shakespeare collection rendered by an app in the UK. The developer here, she really liked the idea of a kind of Pinterest-style view, but teachers have used this interface. You can actually save a page if you can pull out and arrange some things and then hand off that web address to your students and then they can come in and look at it. If you hover over one of those thumbnails, it will show you some further information about those items and if you click through, you're taken directly to that item without even touching DPLA's site. So it's a great, again, way to think about new pathways in. We have phone apps, OpenPix. I haven't tried it, but usually when I come to a city, I open up OpenPix and dial up the DPLA within that. It has actually multiple collections, but they're using DPLA as one of theirs and it uses the GPS signal to show you photographs of buildings from a century ago right around you from the collections. It's a lot of fun if you want to do a walking tour with OpenPix. There are experimental forms of search that people are trying out. Here's one from a librarian and developer who created a sort of color-coded subject heading timeline and visualization. And this is just sort of one example. There's just a visual search that someone did using our data. And it's a great laboratory. I think if you go through the app library of thinking about ways that you can integrate this incredible array of special collections, unified special collections into other environments, put it in other places. We actually have commercial entities. EBSCO, for instance, has a little widget that adds DPLA items to EBSCO's regular commercial search. So you get the EBSCO stuff and you get DPLA stuff and we are totally cool with that. That is great. We want to see it everywhere. We'd love to see it in more commercial apps. It's a great use of the collection. I think really critically our data is also interoperable. So we are making our data interoperable within the United States, right? But I did mention that it's also interoperable internationally. I'll get to that in just a second, but what the interoperability means is, for instance, I used to live in Fairfax County in Virginia, and they have an app for their library that actually is location aware. So they are able to draw in DPLA items into their own personal library app and just show you what's in Fairfax County around the library. That interoperability is really key. Internationally, working with Europeana, which brings together the combined collections of the 28 member states of the European Union, we are, in fact, able to present things like this new exhibit on the 100th anniversary of the Great War. If you look at the tabs here, you'll see that they have ways of getting stuff from American sources, that is DPLA, but also New Zealand and Australian sources. And that's because these other organizations, along with Europeana, have decided on common interchange formats so that we can start to bootstrap into a global digital library. Trove in Australia, which is run by the National Library of Australia. We work with very closely. They have millions of items from Australia that are, again, openly available to all. We can connect up with them. DigitalNZ in New Zealand also has a collection. I love the sort of give and take that we can have with our partners. So here's one, New York Public Library's digital collections. They have a lot of these stereo views. And what they just did is they relaunched in the new year their digital collection site. And we have a lot of this material in the DPLA, but it's also at NYPL. And what they did, which is really great, is that on every page for an item that's housed at New York Public Library, they now have a little box that pops up to say, hey, if you want to see other items like this, go over to the DPLA because you'll see this item, but you'll also see all the related items that they've been able to bring together from all their partners. So it's a great way to hop back up to the DPLA from an individual collection into related items. I think too often, you know, libraries can sort of act as islands and in this way they sort of connect together and really energize the whole. We're also looking forward to other sort of creative uses. So we have a wonderful map collection in large part thanks to David Rumsey, who lives here in the city, as well as many other partners that have digitized maps. And we're looking forward to experimentation on those items as well. Maps, for instance, can really easily be overlaid. This is an overlay of a New Orleans map on present-day Google Earth. This is a map that's found in our collection. Very easy to bring into Google Earth. And to overlay, you can see that what New Orleans looked like at the beginning and now where it is many hundreds of years later. We have artists and creatives really making use of the API and our content as well. I just wanted to highlight this one project that launched recently, which I think is incredibly moving. It's called Every Three Minutes. It's by a historian at Rice University who has set up a Twitter account. You can follow it every three minutes, but on Twitter it's number three. And what it does, it really impresses you if you follow it for a while in the fact that on an average, every three minutes, a slave was sold in Antebellum South in the United States. And what this historian has done is he's now pulled in records from the Digital Public Library of America, as well as other sources, Google Books, and other places, to really show the impact of that. He actually has brought up, so here's, as this tweet goes every three minutes, he's actually showing the names of these people. And it's a really powerful connection to the past and realizing what life was like. Sometimes it's a grandchild, sometimes it's a brother, but he's now able to pull these records in via DPLA. So I think a great example of some of the creative uses that can be made of a kind of large open collection that has all these attributes of openness and availability. I told you at the beginning that I wanted to sort of end by talking about the community itself, because we are really community-driven. We're a small group and we really do rely on so many others. There's a lot of ways to get involved in DPLA if you're interested in what I just spoke about. We have a program and we'll have another application phase coming up really soon, I think by the end of the month, for what we call our community reps. We have 200 of these reps in all states, and actually I think five foreign countries at this point. And what they act and do is they go out into schools, they go out into public libraries and tell other people about the DPLA and what we're doing. They host events, so we have, I think, a half dozen community reps already here in the San Francisco area, some of whom have hosted hackathons and other things to use our API and our information. They, I think, really are sort of ears and sort of mouth across the country. There's only so many places that can be at one time. I think it's actually one. But this allows us really to have a larger community. The other thing I'll mention is we are starting to make a big push into education. We have spent a lot of time and effort and money to put this collection together, and we really want to have it maximally used in the coming years. And we think that education is one of these areas where DPLA can really bridge a gap here for places that are under-resourced or really any place that wants a huge digital attic of 8 million items, which will soon be 10 million, which will soon be 15 million. This is a place where teachers and students can go to find resources that they can use, whether it's books, whether it's images from America's past. Again, in the future, more audio and visual, although we already have, I think, 20,000 films in there as well. It's really just a tremendous resource. And so if you are a teacher or a student, let other people know about this, but you'll see some things coming from us in 2015 with education. There's our strategic plan. It's actually available in lovely PDF form on our website. If you go up there, it's probably headlining right now on the website. There's lots of information within that. And of course, you're always welcome to send me an email, send me a tweet. Let me know your thoughts, and we'd love to have your contributions to DPLA.