The Digital Public Library of America website launched on April 18th.
The DPLA offers a single point of access to millions of items—photographs, manuscripts, books, sounds, moving images, and more—from libraries, archives, and museums around the United States. Users can browse and search the DPLA’s collections by timeline, map, format, and topic; save items to customized lists; and share their lists with others. Users can also explore digital exhibitions curated by the DPLA’s content partners and staff.
It’s easy to get lost in this website, with it’s links to so many online resources.
The featured image for this blog post was found by searching the keyword “Gold Rush” and exploring a link to the David Rumsey map collection.
Searching on the keyword “Obituary”, I found 42928 links to text documents, 26 images and 1 moving picture file. I viewed a handwritten obituary for a Nathaniel Heyward (II), who was killed in the Second Battle of Bull Run, on August 29, 1862 that is from the South Carolina Digital Library – College of Charleston.
Browsing search results for the keyword “Seattle”, I found and listened to “Evening Rain near Seattle”, an audio file from the Mountain West Digital Library.
Because one of my Maryland families were coffee brokers, I searched the keyword “Coffee”, and found a book entitled “Coffee; from plantation to cup” by Francis B Thurber, published in 1881 complete with the digital version of the book from the Biodiversity Heritage Library that is owned by Cornell University Library.
I’m very excited to follow the progress of this new online library.
