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Those of you who follow my antics know I was at an all-day meeting for the Digital Public Library of America project on Tuesday. While I have vague ideas what I was doing there, I have to say that I was still surprised at how few other representatives of rural and/or digitally divided folks were there. You can see the invite list here. I felt lucky that many of my viewpoints were ably represented by Josie Parker from Ann Arbor Public Library, Tony Marx from New York Public Library and Molly Raphael incoming president of ALA. Also in attendance were some of my favorite free culture folks: Brewster Kahle from the Internet Archive, Chris Freeland from the Biodiversity Heritage Library and my friend Richard Nash who runs Cursor Books. I also got to sit right next to Steve Potash from OverDrive right when everyone wanted a piece of him. That said, you can read the list and I’m sure you only vaguely care who I had dinner with. The meeting took place using Chatham House Rules meaning that in the interests of people being able to speak freely, nothing people said would be directly attributed to them.

So, let’s talk about what actually got me out of bed early on a Tuesday morning and has had me all hoppitamoppita since then. I’m going to use the “more inside” thingdoo on WordPress for possibly the first time ever. This idea is so big and exciting it’s had me just … well it’s like the Christmas present you never open, which is always somehow exactly what you want. I’m not sure what this will turn into and I’m sure it won’t be exactly what I want, but I’m excited that there is a friendly accessible group of do-gooders [with some funding, and some history being able to actually do things] who wants to Get Started. I like the Berkman Center folks and the projects they do. Their ideas mesh with mine, about using whatever privilege and powers they have to try to make more stuff accessible to more people and solve problems using technology. It’s also nice to see people who use wikis and blogging in an actual systematic and institutionalized way. The DPLA wiki is pretty robust and yes I’ve even made a few edits.

First off, you can read the notes from the meeting here and I suggest also checking out what other media and blog people have said about this so far, both before and after the meeting. The basic nutshell issue is: none of the big institutions we have seem to be advancing the idea of making consolidated digital content available to Americans in usable and accessible ways. While we can all point to individual libraries doing this in interesting and often effective ways, there is no useful way to assemble the cultural content of our country in such a way that an average person could say “This is our stuff” and point to a thing. Of course librarians since the world began have attacked chaos wherever they’ve found it, but this project seems to me to be something different. This is, as they call it, a “big tent” approach to the idea of what a digital library might be or could be.

Of course I think a lot of people will point to the Library of Congress, the work being done by WhiteHouse.gov, the amazing miracle that is Google or other similar projects and say “Well how is it different from that?” and I think this is what this sort of meeting was supposed to get at. Different people came and did short presentations about different aspects of the problem, the topic was discussed, and each section was summed up in small bullet points. John Palfrey, whose book Born Digital has been on my “to read” pile for an embarassingly long time, was the gracious and kind host and 2 Comments on The Digital Public Library of America and you, and me, last added: 3/5/2011