Typed on a plane – will add links shortly
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It’s been a fascinating couple of days at the DPLA workshops and meetings in Washington DC. Five million dollars has been pledged to the effort by the Sloan Foundation and the Arcadia Fund, so the time has finally come to build the DPLA. I can hardly cover all the wonderful talks and contributions that occurred over these days, so for now I’ll focus on only a few thoughts here.

In our first meeting of the Audience & Participation workstream, it was apparent that we need to expand that diversify that group. As a public librarian, I have found it troublesome that the input and influence during the pre-formative and conceptual development phase of the DPLA has largely been confined to the voices of library directors (with exceptions, for example pushy me who has been fortunate to be as involved as I am). I understand that there’s a certain type of knowledge that library directors bring to this conversation, specifically the challenges associated with explaining the DPLA concept to funders, boards of trustees, or local government officials who might not understand the way it will augment rather than replace the library facilities we know and love. That said, having come straight from the Internet Librarian conference in Monterey to the DPLA meeting, I was reminded of how many brilliant technologists and user experience specialists there are in public (and other) libraries. I’m pleased that at this stage in the conversation these workstreams are more open than ever, and I’m excited to actively solicit input from both the technically savvy public librarian crowd and the customer service savvy individuals, who again are a large and expanding crowd.

That said, I believe that these communication and participation issues will also be addressed at the NDPL conference coming up at the Los Angeles Public Library in November. This will be a gathering of both public library directors and technologists, and I hope it will help put everybody on the same page regarding what the DPLA could and should mean for public libraries. Even outside of the scope of the DPLA, we all know that content is going digital fast but library buildings are still seeing record crowds. We will continue to find excellent new opportunities to engage library users in different ways in library spaces. I’ve been quite clear that I believe the public library has to move from a read-only space to become a read/write space, where knowledge is produced rather than merely consumed. Perhaps, as well as tackling the communication and participation issues associated with the DPLA we’ll talk about a complementary future for library spaces. Perhaps there will be conversation about how we can measure the impact of these kinds of activities and begin to communicate library usefulness to community stakeholders with metrics other than book transactions and circulations. Please add your commentary to the discussion board for this conference, and do register and attend if you can.

Back to the DPLA itself: the Audience & Participation working group also identified a need to get more input from school librarians (lower, middle, and high school). The curriculum building possibilities for the DPLA are really fantastic; if embraced by teachers and librarians they could change classroom interactions substantially. The DPLA vision described my some of the Beta Sprints- particularly extraMUROS, ShelfLife and LibraryCloud enables curatorial learning- in other words understanding information pieces in new ways by relating them to others. Building collections of digital objects based on hyperlinks, and the cognitive meandering associated with hyperlinking is very exciting. The cuts that school libraries have seen recently are tragic, perhaps the DPLA could eventually have some kind of rejuvenating effect in that area.

Finally, on Thursday afternoon, the workstreams regrouped and we had what was in my opinion the most provocative session of the day: a brief use case scenario workshop. From the getgo it has felt awkward to consider the DPLA in the backwards, not-so-user-centric kind of manner it has evolved. I mean, it’s service design/software development 101 to start development with user needs, tell their stories, and design products and services based on the way those stories unfold. As a result, the workgroups all were looking to each other for the answers… for example the Content & Scope folks felt they couldn’t define that until they knew their Audience, while in the Audience group we asked “well, what kind of Content are we working with?” I realize now that while it has felt like we’ve been letting technology geeketry lead the development process rather than user needs, by saving the bulk of the user-centered design process until after self-organized groups built and demonstrated their vision of pieces of the DPLA, we gave people more creative space to work with. I’m making the assumption that from here we’ll be looking at the Beta Sprints that were presented at the plenary meeting and choosing the most compelling attributes, discarding the least exciting, and merging the ideas AND NOW FINALLY considering the wealth of different situations in which a user should look to look to the DPLA as their choice service.

So in conclusion I’d say it’s nice to feel like we are moving forward, and touch briefly on Amanda French’s idea that we need to have a building- a giant DPLA structure- a monument to this effort and to digital knowledge. I’m very much in agreement that this will need a physical footprint and that merely building a web platform, code, and APIs is not enough. That said, a centralized building feels like a mistake to me, and I’d suggest that some kind of distributed, networked architecture that is visable in, on or around library locations across the country would be more effective. We have a public library infrastructure, it’s amazing, and we should be proud to transition it into this new time. I don’t doubt that a centralized building will exist for the DPLA one day, it is almost instinctive to build monuments to great efforts. But any public librarian will tell you this: it’s in the library branches where all the real action is. That is where we need the physical manifestation of this thing.