UNIVERSITY PARK – Dan Cohen will give the 2014 Kaplan Institute talk “Inside the Digital Public Library of America” from 2 p.m. – 3 p.m. March 25, in Foster Auditorium, 102 Paterno Library. The presentation is open to the public and will be broadcast live onMediaSite.
Cohen is founding executive director of the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), which is bringing together the rich resources of America’s libraries, archives and museums, and making them freely available to the world. In his talk, he will give a behind the scenes look at how the DPLA was created, how it functions as a portal and platform, what the staff is currently working on, and what’s to come for the young project and organization.
Until 2013, Cohen was professor of history in the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University and the director of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. His research has been in digital humanities, broadly construed: the impact of new media and technology on all aspects of knowledge, from the nature of digitized resources to 21st century research techniques and software tools to the changing landscape of communication and publication. At the Rosenzweig Center, he has overseen projects ranging from PressForward to the September 11 Digital Archive to the popular Zotero research tool.
His publications include: “Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving and Presenting the Past on the Web” (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), “Equations from God: Pure Mathematics and Victorian Faith” (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), “Hacking the Academy (co-editor, University of Michigan Press, 2012) and “The Ivory Tower and the Open Web” (University of Michigan Press, forthcoming).
He is an inaugural recipient of the American Council of Learned Societies’ Digital Innovation Fellowship. In 2011 Cohen received the Frederick G. Kilgour Award from the American Library Association for his work in digital humanities. In 2012 Cohen was named one of the top “tech innovators” in academia by The Chronicle of Higher Education.
The Jeremiah Kaplan Institute on Libraries, Information Society and Social Policy is funded through a gift from the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy in honor of Jeremiah Kaplan (1926–1993), a co-founder of The Free Press (1947) and later president of Macmillan Publishing Company and Simon & Schuster Inc.
The program is free and open to the public,
For more information or if you anticipate needing accessibility accommodations or have questions about the physical access provided, contact Martha Ney at mdn1@psu.edu or 814-863-5447.