Hello! I'm Mark Matienzo, the Director of Technology for the Digital Public Library of America.
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak at BCLC and to travel to Vancouver.

DPLA has a unique opportunity to connect people across the United States and its territories with cultural heritage materials. In this presentation, I will be talking about some ways in which DPLA has established local connections, including in terms of our organizational infrastructure, our outreach, and our portal and ways in which we could improve that going forward.

In December 2010, the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University convened leading experts in libraries, technology, law, and education to begin work on this ambitious project.
A two-year process of intense grassroots community organization, beginning in October 2011 and hosted at the Berkman Center under the aegis of the DPLA Secretariat, brought together hundreds of public and research librarians, innovators, digital humanists, and other volunteers—organized into six workstreams and led by a distinguished Steering Committee—helped to scope, design, and construct the DPLA. The culmination of all of this hard work was DPLA’s successful launch on April 18, 2013. While the actual in-person celebration event had to be canceled on account of the Boston Marathon bombing, DPLA’s site and services launched right on-time.
The April launch also marked the transition from the Harvard-based planning phase to what we call DPLA’s operational phase, or the start of DPLA as an independent 501c3 non-profit organization.

We describe DPLA in three ways:
First, DPLA is a portal that delivers students, teachers, scholars, and the public to incredible resources, wherever they may be in America.
Secondly, DPLA is a platform that enables new and transformative uses of our digitized cultural heritage.
Thirdly, DPLA is an advocate for a strong public option in the twenty-first century.

When you first visit DPLA's portal, you are given a variety of ways to find cultural materials.

For example, you can perform simple searches, sort the results, and filter them by format, contributing institution or partner, date, language, location, or subject.

In addition to a familiar search paradigm, we provide a few additional interfaces that allow users to find and interact with collections in new ways.
The DPLA Timeline similarly uses available time information—year, month, day—to chart records related to a search over time.
Using the red slider on the right, a user can capture a particular period of time that will display in the blue section at the bottom.
Within this section, they can click on search results for a particular decade or a particular year (indicated by the vertical bars—longer bars have more results).
This can make it easier for some users to browse large result sets.

The DPLA Bookshelf provides is yet another way that we provide an innovative mechanism for users to interact with materials available through our portal.
The items on Bookshelf represent digitized books available through the portal, from providers such as the University of California, the University of Illinois, and the New York Public Library.
The shelf is shown as a vertical stack so that the titles and authors are more easily readable on their spines.
The width of the book represents the actual height of the physical book, and its thickness represents its page count.
The spine is colored with one of ten depths of blue to indicate how relevant the work is to the reader's search.

When a reader clicks on one of the books, additional information about it is displayed to its right. The reader can open the book with the click of a button.
Further, when a reader clicks on a book, the DPLA Bookshelf displays thumbnails of images within the DPLA collection related to that book’s subject areas.
Clicking on a thumbnail displays the image and additional information about it.

In addition, users can explore further by clicking on one of the subjects under which the book has been categorized.
This replaces the existing shelf with a shelf containing all the other books in the DPLA collection categorized under that same subject.

We also provide a map-based interface that allows users to identify the places associated with a given item. I'll be talking about the map, how we augment the data we receive to produce this map, and some of the issues we've identified in the process, later in the presentation.

In addition to these interfaces I've just discussed, DPLA also provides curated exhibitions.
The exhibitions currently on the site were curated by our partners, and through a pilot project with groups of MLIS students. Exhibition contibutors work with DPLA content from multiple institutions around a topic of national significance.
Exhibitions offer some opportunity to create juxtapositions between items, use them in narratives, and give them useful context. We plan to add to our group of exhibitions through a Public Library Partnerships Project which offers digital skills training and content aggregation avenues to public libraries. I will be describing that project in more detail later in the presentation. We're particularly interested in the potential exhibitions have for teachers at many levels. They can be a useful way to introduce DPLA to new users.

For those developers that want to work with all of our metadata, or from a specific provider at once, we provide a bulk download option.

What powers the platform, the portal, and apps is our metadata within the platform.
DPLA harvests metadata in many different formats, such as Dublin Core, MODS, MARCXML, and others. As part of the process to bring in a partner's metadata, we map the incoming data to our Metadata Application Profile. In this process, we also enrich the data.

We encourage to build applications and interfaces using our API. We also provide a public app library, which allows submissions. Submitting your app to the app library can help with promotion, and helps us demonstrate that people are actively using the API.
In addition to the apps listed here, apps submitted to the library include OpenPics, an iOS application for access to cultural heritage images, several map-based visualizations, and Serendip-o-matic, a tool that analyzes your research materials for keywords and finds related items in DPLA and other sources.

As an aggregator of metadata from many institutions, DPLA is in a unique position to help our partners recognize and manage data quality issues.
In October 2013, Europeana and the DPLA organized a first joint rights management workshop to explore this possibility in Boston, Massachusetts.
As a result of further discussions between the DPLA and Europeana, a small joint working group to explore the possibilities for concrete collaborations in more detail has been established. This important work will, above all, make rights clear to the end user and provide a framework for aggregators and our partners.
With the creation and standardization of actionable rights statements, users will know when a work is in the Public Domain, covered under a Creative Commons license or is Rights Restricted, among other possible labels. In addition, we recently submitted an entry to the Knight Foundation's Knight News Challenge to potentially support this work.

The DPLA Content Hubs are large digital libraries, museums, archives, or repositories that maintain a one-to-one relationship with the DPLA.
Content hubs tend to be larger, with collections exceeding 250,000 records and content previews (such as thumbnails or low resolution clips of audio/visual material). Content hubs work with DPLA to make their metadata globally interoperable, meaning that they work with DPLA to normalize, clean, update their data, and investigate new methods for data sharing.

The DPLA Service Hubs are state or regional digital libraries that aggregate information about digital objects from libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural heritage institutions within its given state or region.
Like content hubs, service hubs share metadata and content previews and work with DPLA to make their metadata globally interoperable. In addition, service hubs also represent their community as single metadata aggregation point (state, region, etc., but perhaps differently defined communities in the future).
Each Service Hub also offers its state or regional partners a full menu of standardized digital services, including digitization, metadata, data aggregation and storage services, as well as locally hosted community outreach programs, bringing users in contact with digital content of local relevance.

But, the DPLA is really made up of over 1,100 partners - institutions and organizations from across the US - that provide content to or are hosted by (or have some other relationship with) our Hubs.
In turn, the Hubs serve up this content to DPLA.

This chart represents the breakdown as of 2013 in terms of types of partners whose content is represented in DPLA.
As you can see, there is a wide range of types of institutions, including government agencies, museums, historical societies, academic libraries, and so on.

WHY THE THE HUBS MODEL? Sustainability!

The image on the left shows that one-to-one partnerships can be resource intensive, requiring more staffing and processing power to ingest and update, and to continually manage the variety of individual metadata standards and quality and feed types.
The image on the right, however, represents that the Service and Content Hubs model supports the sharing of responsibilities for metadata management and feeds. It encourages collaboration, which in turn increases the likelihood of more complete and higher quality metadata and sustainable curation models.

I like to think of us more like a water cycle, wherein all partners play an equally visible and valuable role in the content sharing process.

For example, The Maxwell automobile company was formed in 1904 and ceased to exist in 1925.
You love Maxwell cars: How do you know that the image even exists?

This image is from the Nicollet County Historical Society in St. Peter, Minnesota.
The historical society doesn't have a digital collection on their website.
You’ve never heard of Nicollet County or even St. Peter, since you don't live in Minnesota.

Luckily, Nicolett County Historical Society works with the Minnesota Digital Library, which manages their digital collections. Luckily, MDL works with DPLA.
And, luckily for you, you’ve found DPLA and all of the Maxwell Automobile images available from six institutions across the US, including that one from the NCHS.

The luck continues--now you know about MDL because you’ve followed the link back to their site to see that awesome image.
And, maybe now you know that the NCHS exists.
And, just maybe you’ll visit their site, contact them, or spread the good word about how you found that image and where it comes from.

DPLA has another opportunity to help strengthen the local connection between service hubs and the areas they serve.
With the Public Library Partnerships Project, DPLA has the opportunity to provide public librarians in a small number of states with digital skills training.
This project also allows public librarians in libraries with special collections to connect with their local service hub, which can provide additional resources at the state or regional level.
The project will host 12 total workshops that will reach approximately 180 public librarians, teaching skills such as writing for the web, exhibition development, and understanding intellectual property rights.
At the conclusion of the project, we will release a public version of the training materials that others can reuse. Through PLPP, more public library content will appear in DPLA.
Although the quality and sustainability of relationships between DPLA, Hubs, and public libraries is the bigger project priority, we will also be happy to grow our number of public library partners and establish an even stronger local connection.

Our first class of community reps was announced in January 2014.
We admitted approximately 100 people in the first class, and include representation from K-12 education, public libraries, state libraries, municipal archives, public history and museums, publishing, media, genealogy, and many areas of higher education.
Proposed activities by our initial class of reps include creating materials to leverage DPLA as a teaching and learning resource, hackathons and other events targeted at software developers, and outreach to rural public libraries.
Community Reps are assigned a contact that is a full-time DPLA employee, to whom they can direct any questions, and are provided with basic training through a webinar.

Our first class of Community Reps comes from 36 out of 50 states and two countries outside of the US, and helps to extend our outreach significantly.

While Community Reps are volunteers, DPLA provides a small set of responsibilities that we use to help guide their efforts.
First, we expect Community Reps to represent DPLA both formally, through recognition on our website, and informally, through various networks or organizations. Secondly, we ask them to organize at least one activity or event that help spread the word about DPLA as a portal, platform, or public option.
We provide Community Reps with materials such as presentations, flyers, and so forth, and supply them with DPLA merchandise to give away, such as t-shirts, stickers, and mugs.
Thirdly, we ask them to publicize their own efforts through means such as writing posts for the DPLA blog or aggregating notes or tweets from an event or activity.
We also expect Community Reps to check in with a DPLA staff member on a roughly quarterly basis.
Finally, we may ask Community Reps on occasion to give a presentation or participate in an event at our request. For example, if they are attending or live near a conference at which the organizers have asked for a DPLA presentation, we may ask them to take this on if DPLA staff are unable to participate.

The map interface presents items contributed by DPLA partners that have some degree of geographic information included wihtin their metadata.
It is important to note that not all records in DPLA have geographic information.
As the search box at the top indicates, only records with geographic information appear on the map, and while that is a large portion of the DPLA’s collection, it is not all items related to a search.

One very common misconception about the DPLA map is that it organizes records geographically by the institutions they come from.
For example, users of this search might assumed that we have 55 "baseball" items owned by Arizona institutions.
In reality, we have 55 items related to baseball that have been identified as "being about", representing, or depicting Arizona – like images taken there.

As you zoom in, you can more clearly see the places depicted or represented in these items, based on the information.
But how do we get this information?

This goes back to the process by which we work with the metadata we receive.
Many of our providers include place names or other geographic headings in their metadata, and as part of the enrichment process we identify those headings.
We send the text of those headings to a geocoding service, which looks them up in a database, and returns a set of latitude and longitude coordinates for that place.
Once we have those coordinates, we send them back to another service that "reverse geocodes" them and provides us with a full place hierarchy, including country, state or province, region or county, and city, when available.

Usually, this works well, except when it doesn't.
One example of this is what I call the Kansas problem.
If you look at the map, it suggests that there are nearly 450,000 records that are associated with Kansas.
However, very few (if any) of these items are about Kansas. So, why is this happening? Naturally, we discovered it was a bug in our process. The only spatial value being passed to us from the Hubs is "United States."
When we get ONLY that value, we're grabbing coordinates for the center of the country and then reverse identifying the location... as Kansas. We've had other problems as well, such as geocoding services misidentifying which place we were talking about.

Thank you for your time and for bringing me to Vancouver.
I look forward to speaking with you further, and I would greatly appreciate any questions or feedback about the work we're doing at DPLA.