An Open Access Future: Leveraging Wikimedia for Increased Visibility

A single point of access to the riches of America’s cultural heritage stewarded by libraries, archives, and museums across the nation. Ten years ago, that was the audacious founding vision of Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). To more fully realize that vision, DPLA has pioneered a program that connects our nation’s cultural heritage to Wikimedia Commons and Wikipedia. With funding from the Sloan and Wikimedia Foundations, DPLA has built a pipeline that downloads full-resolution artifacts from our network of more than 5,000 contributing institutions and uploads them to Wikimedia Commons, the digital asset management system of the Wikimedia universe. DPLA and our contributors are now the single largest contributor of freely reusable media to Wikimedia Commons, and items from DPLA have already received more than 200 million page views on Wikipedia. Join DPLA staff and stakeholders to talk about the ongoing vision for DPLA’s Wikimedia program and explore how libraries can leverage the vast audience of Wikimedia Commons and Wikipedia to help transform the future of information access.