Serving as a Service Hub for the Digital Public Library of America

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) provides a portal for a rich variety of resources from libraries, museums, archives and cultural heritage institutions across the United States. The success of this portal is accomplished with the support of existing “service hubs,” many of whom have been actively engaged in data aggregation within their states and regions for a decade or more. In this panel, DPLA service hubs representatives from the Minnesota Digital Library, The Portal to Texas History, and the Mountain West Digital Library will discuss how they share their content, the effects of contributing to DPLA, metadata interoperability and best practices, data exchange agreements, technology platforms, community outreach, new digitization initiatives, and other lessons learned from contributing to a national digital library.

Panel participants represent both statewide and regional collaboratives, providing varying perspectives on the topic. This session seeks to acquaint attendees with the relationships between multiple service hubs, their state and regional partners, and DPLA. The presenters will also clarify the difference between “content hubs” that maintain a one-to-one relationship with DPLA and “service hubs” that act as a portal for multiple institutions and provide an on-ramp for smaller memory institutions.