DPLAfest 2017—the fourth major gathering of the Digital Public Library of America’s broad community—will take place on April 20-21, 2017 in Chicago at Chicago Public Library’s Harold Washington Library Center. For more information, visit the DPLA website.
The Norman B. Leventhal Map Center (LMC) provides stewardship to the Boston Public Library’s collection of 200,000 maps and 5,000 atlases ranging in date from 1482 to the present. Central to its mission, the LMC strives to spark curiosity about geography, history, and the world. Their newly launched digital collections harness geospatial developments to engage researchers, educators, and general public library users interested in maps. The digital collection can be searched either textually or spatially using a modern basemap, georeferenced and annotated, and exported for use in more advanced GIS technologies. Educators can create new or adapt existing sets of maps for use in their classrooms, and LMC staff can more easily create online exhibitions. The project utilizes several open-source projects to enhance digital discoverability and use and the resulting code base combining these developments is freely available so that it can be adapted and used further by other organizations.
