A Quick Look at the Growth of Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) Content Since April 2013

Today’s excellent article about DPLA by Jennifer Howard (via COHE) got us wondering about how DPLA was growing, in terms of material that can be accessed by users, since it launched in April.
Here’s what we learned.

Solid Growth

We’re impressed with the growth in publicly accessible material that DPLA has provided since April.
It’s one thing to arrange for partnership but something else to get the material online and usable while also adding records from other partners (not to mention everything else* a new organization needs to get done). Kudos!
The largest contributor of items/records to the DPLA since is HathiTrust.
HathiTrust became a DPLA partner in June and as of today users can access 1,741,537 items HT items via the DPLA database.
We’re not going to review contributions by DPLA partners (you can do that on your own) but here’s a look at how content from other large contributors has grown since April.

Other Large Contributors

The first number below each name is the number of records that were accessible in the DPLA database from that organization on April 23, 2013. The second number is the total as of today.
Mountain West Digital Library
693,469–>794,983
National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)
586,885–>701,357
Smithsonian Institution
568,136–>624,986
The Portal to Texas History
325,552 (New to the Top 7 since launch)
University of Southern California Libraries
257,115 (New)
Digital Library of Georgia
72,475–>166,260
In Top 7 on April 23, 2013
Biodiversity Heritage Library
112,282–>120,743
Kentucky Digital Library
88,127–>99,307
You can view the complete list of all partners along with the current number of records in the database here.
Sources: DPLA Partners and Partner List from April 23, 2013 (via Internet Archive)

One More Note

We can’t say enough good things about the DPLA E-Book Bookshelf tool that launched in October.
This resource has been a real crowd pleaser when we’ve discussed and demoed it during recent presentations. The source code is open and a web-based version of the tech is also available to help organize your own materials. 
Links, video and a few more thoughts about the DPLA E-Book Bookshelf here.
* One example, find and hire a Director of Technology. On November 2oth, DPLA hired Mike Matienzo for this position.

Filed under: Archives and Special Collections, Digital Collections, Interactive Tools, Libraries, News, Patrons and Users, Public Libraries