Collaboration at Scale: Europeana and the Digital Public Library of America

Collaboration at Scale: Europeana and the Digital Public Library of America

Keynote Speakers: Dan Cohen, Director of the Digital Public Library of America
Jill Cousins, Executive Director of the Europeana Foundation

National and international digital libraries such as Europeana and the Digital Public Library of America present new avenues for research, using new ways of aggregating and presenting scholarly materials. In this joint keynote, Jill Cousins of Europeana and Dan Cohen of DPLA will explore how each of their collections were assembled, and how they interact with each other in projects such as the 100th anniversary of the First World War. They will also showcase ways in which new digital collections can expand beyond their original sites into other locations through APIs, open data, and other techniques.

Dan Cohen is the Founding Executive Director of the DPLA, where he works to further the DPLA’s mission to make the cultural and scientific heritage of humanity available, free of charge, to all. Prior to his tenure, Dan was a Professor of History and the Director of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. At the Center, Dan oversaw projects ranging from new publishing ventures (PressForward) to online collections (September 11 Digital Archive) to software for scholarship (the popular Zotero research tool). His books include Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web (with Roy Rosenzweig) and Equations from God: Pure Mathematics and Victorian Faith. Dan was an inaugural recipient of the American Council of Learned Societies’ Digital Innovation Fellowship. In 2011 he received the Frederick G. Kilgour Award from the American Library Association for his work in digital humanities, and in 2012 he was named one of the top “tech innovators” in academia by the Chronicle of Higher Education. Dan received his bachelor’s degree from Princeton, his master’s degree from Harvard, and his PhD from Yale.

Jill Cousins is Executive Director of the Europeana Foundation, responsible for the running and management of Europeana.eu; the flagship portal of the European Union that brings together the content of the Archives, Audio visual collections, Libraries and Museums of Europe. She is also Director of The European Library, a vertical content aggregator for national and research libraries in Europe for the researcher. She has many years of experience in web publishing including the commercial publishing world as European Business Development Director of VNU New Media and scholarly publishing with Blackwell Publishing. Jill sits on the Board of Globethics.net, a library for ethics literature and is on the steering committee for Euroclio. She regularly speaks on both strategic and practical issues relating to digital libraries.