A 50-minute presentation and discussion around the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) as a tool for teaching and research. The DPLA provides a platform where over 30 million digital cultural heritage materials from institutions across the country can be found. DPLA aggregates metadata for these objects and has made this metadata freely available on their API for users to employ in their research or in the creation of applications that can take advantage of the materials for further use. Many of the objects found in DPLA are primary resources related to the history of the United States and relate to the human experience.

The DPLA has also utilized these resources to create curated resources, including exhibits combining resources from multiple contributing institutions that would not have been linked together otherwise and primary source sets that can be used in classrooms to help students think critically about history, literature, and how to analyze various source types.

During this session attendees will learn how to access and search the API as well as explore the curated content in DPLA and learn how to create their own resources for teaching from the materials found in DPLA. Attendees will also discuss how they would use this resource in their classrooms as well as how contributing institutions can improve the resources and metadata for use in Digital Humanities projects and research.