Projects

As laid out in our strategic plan, DPLA works with a national network of partners to:

  • Make millions of materials from libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural institutions across the country available to all in a one-stop discovery experience.
  • Provide a library-controlled marketplace and platform for libraries to purchase, organize, and deliver ebooks and other e-content to their patrons.
  • Convene library leaders and practitioners to explore and advance technologies that serve, inform, and empower their communities.

In service of these goals, we also are currently working on the following projects:

Digital Equity Project

In June 2022, DPLA announced the launch of the Digital Equity Project. The project is supported by an $850,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation to fund our effort to advance racial justice in American archives. This funding will enable DPLA to launch a digital equity project to develop community-based partners and increase partner capacity to lead this work. The three-year project will provide support for underrepresented, under-resourced archives and expand DPLA’s capacity for supporting and partnering with diverse archival projects.

If your organization is interested in getting involved with the Digital Equity Project, please get in touch.

DPLA + Wikimedia

In December 2019, DPLA announced a new project, supported by Sloan Foundation, to facilitate the incorporation of artifacts from DPLA’s partner institutions into Wikipedia. This project created a single pipeline for the many diverse DPLA data providers to contribute digital assets to Wikimedia Commons, which makes them available for inclusion in Wikipedia articles, allowing for increased discovery and use of these assets. Compatible materials are those that use a copyright license or rights statement that marks them as public domain or openly licensed so that they may be used on Wikimedia Commons, and which have media accessible in a machine-readable way (such as IIIF). In the first year of this project, we worked with seven partners, representing more than 200 institutions, to add 1.4 million image files of photos, documents, and maps to the Wikimedia Commons digital asset management platform. This makes them available to be included in Wikipedia articles and viewable by vast new audiences. You can also track our upload progress here, and see the pageviews our uploads have shown up in here. If you or your organization are interested in contributing to Wikimedia, please get in touch. If you’d like to learn more, this webinar is a good place to start

Find out more about our Wikimedia Project here.

Black Women’s Suffrage

In commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the 19th amendment in August 2020, DPLA launched a new collaborative collection of artifacts related to the history of Black women in the suffrage movement, and, more broadly, women’s rights, voting rights, and civic activism between the 1850s and the 1960s. With the support of Pivotal Ventures, an investment and incubation company founded by Melinda Gates, DPLA is working with a set of partners to digitize new materials and create associated metadata, as well as pull together artifacts from our partner institutions’ collections across the country along with contextual content. Ultimately, the goal of the new collection is to elevate Black women’s activism in our national narrative. The collection launched in September 2020, and new materials continue to be added. You can visit the Black Women’s Suffrage Collection here. To find out more about the collection, or to find out how to contribute to the collection, please email us