Doing history is fun because of the quirky stories, pictures and personal objects, such as the record of the deaths and births in the family Bible found here in the DPLA: Digital Public Library of America. Until recently, scholars with the resources to travel were able to view the family keepsakes, the postcards, and the oral histories that make storytelling so compelling. Now anyone can find these resources from home. The Digital Public Library of America brings together millions of books, photographs, serials, maps, obituaries and oral histories from 1,100 partners. It has never been easier to write lively history.
Searching is easy from the homepage. Start with keyword and limit by place, time, or format. Limiting is visual, so when Minnesota and lakes is entered, the user can choose the guide on the side icon and see that it is possible to get 3,000 images, 1,500 texts or four moving images. Limit by an owning institution: in this case, the National Archives at Chicago, The Minnesota Digital Initiative, The University of Minnesota, or others. Users can also limit by the partner, in this case the National Archives, the Hathi Trust, or the Minnesota Digital Initiative. A student trying to understand the relationship Minnesotans have with their lakes they would be helped enormously by seeing the wonderful postcards, snapshots of parades, as well as the books about runoff's impact on Minnesota lakes.
Searching by place takes the user to a map, choose everything from a state or click on the map to start to see the documents associated with more specific places – eight items from the Iron Range, a book of canoe trails near Brainerd, and scads of things near the Minneapolis area, including a photograph from “Duff's Bar”, circa 1973. Search on the timeline. Using a virtual slide rule, you can situate yourself on a year or a decade. There are 41,000 items in 1914, but only 857 in 1758. 1758 was a good year, but mostly links to books and documents; also an image of some beautiful copper measuring cups. There is the touching page that is the records of births and deaths from a family Bible from Wake Forest, North Carolina.
Users can view kaleidoscopic presentations of the materials through the exhibitions tab. The This Land is Your Land one takes the user on different tours: park rangers, park users, images of the parks under construction, and more. Exhibitions bring together the materials from the different collections to show the immigrant experience, the Great Depression, activism in America, and more. Each virtual exhibition “hall” has many separate displays. It is easy to change the view, from ten to 100 items per page. Navigating is easy and intuitive. Images can be blown up to show more detail. The technical notes within the image include the scanner type, the format of the image, and more. Importantly, the original source is noted. There are several apps for iPads and iPhones, and guides on the side for the researcher.
This is a fun source that will only grow in its utility as more partners join in the enterprise.
