We often hear that libraries are losing relevance in the Internet Age; we have users and funders who say, "why do we need libraries - can't you find most everything online?" While the web has made an incredible amount of information available at our fingertips, libraries continue to play a vital role in communities, both guiding users to find the most useful information and in providing those without Internet access a lifeline to information.
A colleague recently shared this short documentary, Why Libraries Matter that depicts a day in the life of the New York Public Library. While certainly showing a public library perspective, many of these issues translate to academic libraries as well.
Share your comments and consider how you can support libraries in your community.
Showing posts with label public. Show all posts
Showing posts with label public. Show all posts
6/13/2014
4/22/2013
Free to All
According to its website, “the DPLA brings together the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world. It strives to contain the full breadth of human expression, from the written word, to works of art and culture, to records of America’s heritage, to the efforts and data of science.”
What makes this particularly exciting is that through the use of metadata these millions of items can be accessed and connected in new ways for the creation of new resources and new knowledge. And those conversant with programming can contribute by building applications or discovery tools.
DPLA is free, it’s online, it’s for everyone, and “it 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.” So stop reading this blog and start exploring at DPLA!
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