Minnesota joins project to centralize nation's digital libraries

Minnesota is joining a pilot project to combine and centralize the country's digital library collections.

The Minnesota Digital Library, a collaboration of the University of Minnesota, the Minnesota Historical Society and other institutions, will be an early contributor to the Digital Public Library of America, or DPLA.

The Minnesota Digital Library will receive $350,000 in grant money to take part in the project.

"One of the functions of the DPLA is to coalesce all of these regional or state digital libraries into a unified national resource which has a lot of powerful possibilities," said John Butler, associate librarian at the university.

That could have profound impacts for educators, for hobbyists, for genealogists, first to aggregate large amounts of data from these collections and then bring to it the kind of analysis or retrieval or viewing tools on top of data that has been pulled together by the DPLA," Butler said.

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