The DPLA is the Digital Public Library of America.
It’s a conversation that’s been happening for - it will be two years in October.
But late last spring, people were talking about what is the DPLA, what does it look
like, what does it do, and we thought to kind of relieve some tension off of people wanting
to build things, we would do something called a Beta Sprint.
In the Beta Sprint basically we ask people to build what they think the DPLA should be,
and the moment we said build, it could have been code, it could have been an actual prototype
which is what we did, it could have been just, you know an essay or a slide deck and we had
60 people, groups - teams, say that they were interested or letters of intent and we actually
had over 40 submissions at the end of the summer, because all summer we spent sprinting,
really intense.
But by the end of August you had to summit your product and then it was reviewed by a
really great review panel and then six were selected to present as, you know top influencers
or some really good ideas there to influence and, I guess, inform, design our conversation
around DPLA.
And then there are three other, you know other lightening moments that also had some really
cool ideas, but maybe they want core ideas, but may be some really neat things to consider.
So the Beta Sprint team I worked on like I said with the University of Illinois; and
it was really to amplify a lot of work that has been going on the IMLS has been supporting
for the past nine years, around the IMLS digital collections and content registry and the complementary
resource called Over the History. �