Learning Resources | News

USC Contributes Content to Digital Public Library

• By Leila Meyer
• 08/26/13

The University of Southern California (USC) Libraries has partnered with the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) as a content hub and has contributed more than 250,000 items from its own digital library to the DPLA.

The DPLA, which launched in April, provides scholars, students, and public researchers from around the world with a single point of access to photographs, manuscripts, books, sounds, videos, and other items from the country's libraries, archives, and museums. The DPLA contains more than 2.8 million items, and the addition of USC Libraries' collections more than quadruples the DLPA's number of items related to the history of Los Angeles and Southern California.

“USC Libraries have such rich and deep collections, and they are at the forefront of digitizing and preserving an incredible range of materials,” said Dan Cohen, executive director of DLPA, in a prepared statement. “It is wonderful to welcome USC Libraries as a content hub and to add their unique subject strengths to ours.”

Contributions from the USC Libraries' collections include more than 100,000 Works Progress Administration census cards, which contain economic and sociological data on pre-World War II Los Angeles and its residents, as well as details on the census process and census workers themselves. Other contributions include 75 years of photographs of Los Angeles public murals and photographs of the city during its 20th century boom years.

“The DPLA has built an excellent platform for connecting researchers to vital library collections on a global scale," said Catherine Quinlan, dean of the USC Libraries, in a prepared statement.

The DPLA offers an application programming interface (API) and other tools that software developers can use to build custom research and presentation applications using DPLA collections.

The USC Libraries' digital collections are available now on the DPLA site.