Today marked the launch of the Digital Public Library of America. What is it? Well:
The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) brings together the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world. ... The DPLA aims to expand this crucial realm of openly available materials, and make those riches more easily discovered and more widely usable and used.
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.
More exciting projects are surely on the way; one promising site also launched today is DPLA StackLife, which visualizes the collection for simpler browsing by keyword or subject. On the American cookery bookshelf, I found a collection of recipes printed and bound for the 1939 World's Fair (Crosby Gaige, New York World's Fair Cook Book, The American Kitchen); I threw together a simple ginger, molasses, and sour cream cake from it that was delicious.
A sampling of 1913 portraits, below, from the Holsinger Studio are featured in the DPLA corpus; these images are via the University of Virginia Library
