Digital Public Library of America
Humans are curious. We like to explore and to know things. This is how the wheel came to be invented, how we learned to create fire and why Benjamin Franklin nearly killed himself trying to electrocute a turkey. (Admit it, you are curious as to why Franklin would want to electrocute a turkey.) According to Timothy J. Jorgensen, writing for Smithsonian, Ben Franklin “… was very fond of food, and turkey was one of his favorite dishes. For some reason, he believed a turkey killed with electricity would be tastier than one dispatched by conventional means: decapitation.” Long story short, in his attempt to electrocute the turkey he had hoped to eat for dinner, he shocked himself instead when “he mistakenly touched the electrified wire intended for the turkey while his other hand was grounded thereby diverting the full brunt of the turkey-killing charge into his own body.” Fortunately, Franklin lived to see another day and was far more careful two years later when he went running around outside during a lightning storm with a metal key attached to a kite – a far more familiar story to us all.
It has been two hundred and seventy-three years since that turkey escaped death, and over the following centuries humans have continued to be curious. The difference between then and now is that we do not have to participate in risky experiments to know things — at least, the mundane things. We can just pull our phones out of our pockets and look that stuff up. McDonald’s Secret Sauce? No longer a secret. Live scores from the World Senior Curling Championships? They will be posted beginning February 21st. No matter how random our questions are, we can find answers. Because it’s 2023 and, yeah, the Internet. Wouldn’t it be great if (almost) everything you wanted to know was under one umbrella? And that umbrella consisted of the collections from libraries, museums, universities and cultural organizations from around the country? Welcome to the Digital Public Library of America or, as the cool kids call it, the DPLA.
The DPLA
A non-profit headquartered in Boston, the DPLA “…empowers people to learn, grow, and contribute to a diverse and better-functioning society by maximizing access to our shared history, culture, and knowledge.” Through a partnership of multiple organizations across the country, a curious person–especially one with a project to work on–can now access and learn gobs of stuff previously only available to those with special privileges. By offering a collective made up by The National Archives and Records Administration, the Harvard Library, the J. Paul Getty Trust, the California Digital Library and more, all of us have access to “47,4681,069 images, texts, videos and sounds from across the United States.” They may not have the Secret Sauce recipe, but they’re still bringing the sauce. For Padres looking for primary sources to support thesis statements, look no further. Writing a paper on voting rights? Read an excerpt from congressional hearings on voting rights from 1993 or watch a newsclip of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. speaking on the subject in 1965. Browse for information by topic or by partner. California History students can jump right into the California Digital Library on the easy to use Partners page.
But that’s not all.
The DPLA offers a series of digital exhibitions that “tell stories of national significance through sources and narrative, created by librarians and historians.” Current exhibitions include A History of US Public Libraries, as well as the oddly compelling Best Foot Forward: The shoe industry in Massachusetts, where it can be learned that, “It was approximately 40,000 years ago that mankind first donned a pair of shoes.” Quack Cures and Self-Remedies: Patent Medicine “…is about the phenomenon of Americans self-medicating with opiates, alcohol, and herbal supplements…” from 1860 to 1920–an interesting read as we come out of a pandemic riddled with quack cures for COVID-19. History, inevitably, repeats itself.
But there is no better place for the curious mind than the Smithsonian Institution. A partner of the DPLA and a veritable modern version of the Cabinet of Curiosities, this institution is the possessor of, among other things, Dorothy’s ruby slippers, Indiana Jones’ Hat and Hank Aaron’s bat. The Smithsonian is full of wondrous things. With more than 7 millions objects, images, moving images, texts and sounds, there is much to browse and search for because we like to learn about interesting stuff for fun, too! It’s fun to browse through the photos of historical and memorable items in this particular collection that tell the story of the United States in their own way, but there are also thousands of textual records that may serve a young (or old!) historian looking for primary source historical documents. Consider the <a rel=”noreferrer noopener” href=”http://quirky, self-deprecating letter (right) from the 21 year old Andy Warhol to the managing editor of the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, Russell Lynes. There are but a few facts to be gained from the content of the letter, but much more to be intuited about the young artist from it’s style. The DPLA provides a ready catalog of these items with thorough historical descriptions, images, and links to related items.
But wait, there’s more!
The DPLA is always striving to add new content in collaboration with expanded partnerships. In 2021 the DPLA announced it “is creating a Digital Equity Project to help support underrepresented, under-resourced archives and help DPLA partner with diverse archival projects.” With an influx of funding from the Mellon Foundation, the DPLA is granting financial support for other institutions to further important projects, such as the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library’s Living Archives Project “which is documenting the impact of the pandemic on Black, Latinx, and Indigenous communities.” Social justice has a home with the DPLA as well!
DPLA Ebooks : The Palace Bookshelf
Finally, let us focus on ebooks and other electronic publications to which we have free access. The Palace Bookshelf feature takes us to an array of things to read. For free. Admittedly, we won’t find the hottest titles hitting bookstores right now. What will we find? Among the offerings we will find the classic Sherlock Holmes story The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot, as well as Report of Russian Active Measures Campaigns and Interference in the 2016 U.S. Election, and January 6th on the Record: The Investigation into the Attack on the U.S. Capitol – neither of which was investigated by Detective Holmes. So, come for the classic fiction in ebook form, as well as non-fiction published materials related to present day issues, stay for the banned books. Why were they banned? You must be curious. Read one!
Lastly, the Massachusetts Historical Society has several digital items on display in association with the DPLA. At the moment, a digital copy of the letter Benjamin Franklin wrote to his brother in 1750 recounting the failed attempt to electrocute the turkey is not among those being shared in the collective. Have no fear. To see a digital copy of the letter, and read the transcription due to Franklin’s antiquated handwriting, you may visit the Massachusetts Historical Society directly using the above links. Read this primary source for yourself to see Franklin’s own words regarding the “…Experiment in Electricity that I desire never to repeat.”
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