I’m in Los Angeles now for the National Digital Public Library conference, which promises to be a group of forward thinking, influential public librarians and library administrators thinking through how they might contribute to, benefit from, and provide end users with valuable services from a Digital Public Library of America.  Here is the agenda.  Briefly, here are the two things I have on my mind going into this.

First, there’s been talk that the DPLA needs to focus on APIs first, and user interfaces second.  While that’s an logical approach for any project, I’m deeply concerned that such an approach actually means that building useful applications and creating different ways of interacting with DPLA content will be sidelined as low priority, the result of which will make the DPLA nothing more than a vast collection of collections that commercial vendors will use to build and sell useful apps to public libraries.  Of course it’s fantastic that this content will be available for vendors to work with, no doubt some of the greatest innovations will come from there, but I want to see some of the initial development dollars for this project spent on products that will immediately impact public library users.  I can probably count on both hands the number of public libraries with web application teams that have the time and the skills to work with DPLA APIs to make slick, beautiful, usable applications.  I believe the university environment is different, and this API/interoperability base is sufficient for their library staff to work with to create great, useful end products, but again I don’t think it’s anywhere near the scope of average public library capacity to do this work in house.

Second, I continue to dwell on the need for a physical footprint for the DPLA in the public library world.  This needs to happen in the form of content creation kiosks, stations, or even larger facilities of some type.  Public contribution (in the form of user-generated content) to the DPLA guarantees its usefulness, success, and public buy-in, and with a massive established infrastructure of public library buildings across the country we absolutely have to think about how to leverage these assets to make the DPLA a lasting, sustainable venture.  Our greatest cultural artifacts may be the yet undiscovered, undocumented, unrecorded troves of knowledge stored in boxes of physical media in citizens’ basements, or they may even be embedded in the experiences and thoughts of library users themselves, just waiting to be told as stories or illustrated as new media works. Jeffrey Schnapp over at the Harvard MetaLab wrote a nice post speaking to this point, I remain vocal and active in the development of the librarylab.org architectural pattern supporting content creation on the scale necessary for a national digital library, and I’m tempted to also to point to the recent success of the Fayetteville Free Library’s FabLab project in their public library as a forward-thinking project in this context.  It is not enough to build a website or establish a set of standards for the DPLA to be a success; a national digital library needs to be woven into the fabric of our communities just as any of our other basic services are.

I’ll follow up with some notes and observations after this fascinating meeting / planning session is over.