Earlier this month, the Digital Public Library of America launched its website to much nerdy fanfare online. This online platform aims to provide a singular portal for searching and accessing digitized content from a wide array of American libraries, museums, and research institutions. Forty-two cultural organizations have collaborated so far, in an effort spearheaded by the Berkman Institute for Internet and Society at Harvard. Though the idea has been around for a while, active planning and implementation over the past two years have finally yielded some results. According to Scott McLemee’s column in Inside Higher Ed, the DPLA currently catalogs “about 2.4 million digital objects, including books, manuscripts, photographs, recorded sound, and film/video.” (Impressive for a brand new endeavor; for comparison, the Smithsonian has more than 130 million items¹, and DePaul’s library has just over 1.1 million.²)

In an interview with The Atlantic, the project’s executive director Dan Cohen said that the DPLA’s primary goal is to  “make the maximal amount of content available in a maximally open way.” To that end, the site was designed in as forward-thinking a way as possible. It’s a simple design that works well across browsers and devices, including mobile phones and tablets. The URL was chosen for ease and brevity, even if at first it seems ambiguous: dp.la. (Even the thickest of thumbs can type that in a mobile browser.) The DPLA includes a powerful application-programming interface (API) with normalized metadata so third party app developers can create novel ways of accessing and leveraging information in the collection. Content is geocoded and linked to a dynamic map, as well as tagged with chronological information and linked to a searchable timeline. As much of the content as possible is licensed under Creative Commons, so it is in the public domain.

Sounds awesome, right?

After spending some time with the site, both on my laptop and smartphone, I have to say it is pretty awesome, though there is definitely room for improvement, expansion, and general getting-the-kinks-out.

I decided to first search for one of my favorite American writers, T.S. Eliot. The first little snag I encountered: searches for “TS Eliot”, “T.S. Eliot”, and “Thomas Stearns Eliot” all generated distinctly different results, with no overlapping content, for a total of just nine objects in the collection. (Google yields pretty much the same results for all three search terms.) I liked that the results included works that mentioned T.S. Eliot, even if he was not the primary subject, but was less excited to see a link to transcribed text from a late 19th century brochure about bodybuilding, which was included, I presume, because it mentions an “Eliot Street Gymnasium”.

I realized that this is not—at least not yet—the place to come to find straightforward, basic information about a subject. None of the content I saw would tell me much about who T.S. Eliot was, or even give me a bibliography of his work.  The images I saw struck me as more supplementary material, something a student or scholar might look for if they already had a foundation of knowledge, and just wanted to add a little something extra.

To check out the map feature (which, by the way, works much better on my laptop than my phone, as does the timeline), I zoomed in on my hometown, Milwaukee, WI, and saw eighty-three results, including lots of pictures of animals at a long-closed zoo, and a number of beautiful old postcards of downtown buildings. Interesting stuff.

To test the timeline, I searched the year my grandmother was born, the year I was born, and the year my son was born.  The timeline is intuitive to use, with a slider to move quickly across decades and centuries, and arrows to advance year-by-year. There are almost 10,000 objects from 1921, more than 13,000 from 1981, and more than 22,000 from 2010. Quickly scrolling through the 1921 results, the lion’s share was comprised of death certificates from Utah. Drilling down, I could see these were all from Mountain West Digital Library, which aggregates scanned content from Utah, Nevada, Idaho, and Hawaii. So, sort of obscure content, if you ask me, but legitimately from 1921.

After these searches, it became obvious that any information accessed through the DPLA is only as good as the originating organization’s information. Because the DPLA does not have its own archive, it’s essentially a very obliging middleman. It relies upon the primary institutions to determine what content is digitized and how it is housed online. As a result, you’ll find things you won’t find elsewhere, but they may not be exactly the sort of thing you’re actually looking for. For now, DPLA is a great complement to your college library and other cultural media resources like Open Culture. It’s searchable in unique and usable ways, and has loads of potential.

(It’s also worth checking out DPLA’s Exhibitions, which are collections of curated content gathered by theme.)