We are excited to announce that Duke University Libraries has officially joined the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA)! Our first contribution is metadata from the Broadsides and Ephemera digital collection, which is now accessible through DPLA.
Many of us here at Duke have been excited about the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) since their launch in April of 2013. DPLA’s mission is to bring together America’s cultural riches into one portal. Additionally, they provide a platform for accessing and sharing library data in technologically innovative and impactful ways via the DPLA API. If you are not familiar with DPLA, be sure to take a look at their website and watch their introductory video.
The North Carolina Digital Heritage Center (NCDHC) is our local service hub for DPLA and we met with them to understand requirements for contributing metadata as well as the nuts and bolts of exposing our records for harvesting. They have a system in place that is really easy for contributing libraries around the state, and we are very thankful for their efforts. On our side, we chose our first collection to share, updated rights statements for the items in that collection and contacted NCDCH to let them know where to find our metadata (admittedly these tasks involved a bit more nitty gritty work than I am describing here, but it was still a relatively simple process).
In mid-June, NCDHC harvested metadata from our Broadsides and Ephemera digital collection and shortly thereafter, voila the records are available through DPLA!!
We plan to continue making more collections available to DPLA, but are still selecting materials. What collections do you think we should share? Let us know in the comments below or through Twitter or Facebook.
Thanks again to NCDHC for the wonderful work they do in helping us and other libraries across North Carolina participate in the ambitious mission of the Digital Public Library of America!