Dan Cohen is the founding director of the
Digital Public Library of America

Dan Cohen, Founding Executive Director of the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), will deliver the keynote address at the Minnesota Digital Library’s (MDL) 12th Annual Meeting in St. Paul on Tuesday, June 3, 9:30 a.m., at the Continuing Education Center at the University of Minnesota’s St. Paul Campus.

DPLA’s mission is to “bring together the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and make them freely available to the world.” One of DPLA’s key contributors is the Minnesota Digital Library, which digitizes and provides materials to DPLA’s online portal from cultural heritage organizations across Minnesota. The portal currently hosts more than seven million items from more than 1,300 contributing organizations.

“The Minnesota Digital Library community is thrilled and honored to have DPLA Executive Director Dan Cohen keynote our annual gathering this year,” said John Butler, director of data and technology programs at the University of Minnesota Libraries. “Dan is a renowned scholar and digital mover and shaker who, to our great fortune, is leading the largest community-based digital library effort this country has ever seen.”

The MDL Annual Meeting is a one-day conference at which MDL participants, partners, and interested professionals gather to learn about MDL and to attend sessions on a variety of topics including teaching methods, digital collection management, best practices in digitization (regarding scanning, preservation, and metadata), and more.

About Dan Cohen

Dan Cohen is the Founding Executive Director of the Digital Public Library of America and the author of “Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web.” Before joining DPLA, he was a Professor of History and the Director of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. Cohen was named one of the top “Tech Innovators” of 2012 by the Chronicle of Higher Education.

About the Minnesota Digital Library

The Minnesota Digital Library provides public access to photographs and images, maps, journals, oral histories, letters, and works of art. The online library’s premier collection, “Minnesota Reflections,” tells the story of Minnesota’s rich cultural past through more than 190,000 historical treasures. Professionals from libraries, archives, historical societies, museums and an array of other organizations (more than 150 organizations in all) follow community digitization standards and best practices as they build the collection.

The Minnesota Digital Library is supported by the Arts and Historical Legacy Fund of the Clean Water, Land, and Legacy Amendment to the Minnesota State Constitution, passed in 2008. MDL is a service program of Minitex, an information and resource-sharing program of the Minnesota Office of Higher Education and the University of Minnesota Libraries.