• FirstBook, a Washington-based nonprofit dedicated to promoting literacy for children in low-income communities, announced this week that they have committed to purchasing $1 million in books, split between two publishers: HarperCollins and Lee & Low Books. The books will feature minorities, characters of color, and other voices that are rarely represented in children's literature but which resonate with the communities that the organization serves—including special needs and LGBT communities—according to FirstBook. "With these major purchases, First Book is continuing to harness market forces to create social change," writes the organization's President and CEO Kyle Zimmer. "By aggregating the untapped demand for books and resources in thousands of low-income communities, we're helping to create a new market for the publishing industry."
Reading Room, Library of Congress, ca. 190-: Photograph shows several people seated at tables looking at books or albums, with card catalogs and magazine racks behind them, in the second floor southeast pavilion of what is now called the Thomas Jefferson Building. Reproduction number: LC-USZ62-37240
• Have you heard? A new national digital library is in development. David S. Ferriero, the archivist of the United States, announced this week that the Digital Public Library of America, or DPLA, will soon launch its first pilot project. Several content providers, including the National Archives and Harvard University, are sharing digitized content from their online catalogs as part of the Digital Hubs Pilot Project, which will aggregate onlin digital collections into one "hub." If you are in, or near, Boston, the festivities surrounding the launch of the pilot program will take place on April 18-19 at the Boston Public Library's central location.
The National Archives will provide a whopping 1.2 million digital copies from its catalog for the DPLA project. For those of you who might not already be aware (I counted myself as part of that crowd up until this week), the DPLA is a "large-scale, collaborative project across government, research institutions, museums, libraries, and archives to build a digital library platform to make America's cultural and scientific history free and publicly available anytime, anywhere, online through a single access point." Which is wonderful news, for sure. But I, for one, will miss old-school reading rooms once they are gone for good.]]> - Catherine A. Cardno
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