Digital Public Library of America Receives $250,000 Grant From IMLS for Digital Hubs Pilot

From the Institute of Museum and Library Services:

The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) announced today (9/13/2012) a $250,000 grant to support the development of the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). The National Leadership Grant for Libraries in the Advancing Digital Resources category will help fund the launch of the DPLA’s Digital Hubs Pilot Program, a project that will take the first steps to bring together existing U.S. digital library infrastructure into a sustainable national digital library system.
“The Digital Hubs Pilot Program is tremendously exciting,” said IMLS Director Susan Hildreth. “At the heart of this effort is a genuine desire to tackle the barriers that reduce access to digital content. I am confident that the DPLA’s generous spirit of collaboration will result in innovations that help to leverage the significant investments institutions have made in digitizing their collections and create greater public access.”
Under the Digital Hubs Pilot Program, the DPLA will partner with existing statewide digital library projects (service hubs) and existing large content repositories (content hubs) to define, test, and implement digital services and participation agreements. Led by DPLA Director for Content Emily Gore, the Hubs Program will establish foundational sites in the DPLA, a distributed national network of connected service and content hubs.
This grant specifically will support the planning and implementation of a regional service hub pilot at the Mountain West Digital Library, including the set up and coordinated rollout of regional digital services, such as digitization services, metadata consultation, data aggregation, repository services, and community programming, as well as related workshops and meetings.
“IMLS’s support for this key piece of the DPLA Hubs Pilot will enable us to work with the Mountain West Digital Library, a regional collaborative, to add content and services and to develop a model for regional collaborative contribution to the DPLA,” said Gore.
The IMLS National Leadership Grant program supports projects that address challenges faced by the museum, library, and archive fields and that have the potential to advance practice in those fields. It funds innovative responses to challenges that have been identified as national in scope.

See Also: Digital Public Library of America Announces New Director for Content (August 2, 2012)
See Also: Digital Public Library of America Receives $1 Million Award From National Endowment for the Humanities (July 26, 2012)

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