Sharing South Dakota's cultural heritage: harvesting digital collections into the Digital Public Library of America and beyond

Abstract

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) enables the discovery of digitized content held by U.S. cultural heritage institutions by aggregating metadata contributed from participating organizations. The DPLA differs from other resource sharing networks by providing not only the locality of an item from a catalogue such as WorldCat but offers easy access to the digitized item itself. Particularly for smaller libraries, archives, and museums, including content in the DPLA makes that content much easier for users to discover, access, and contextualize than it would be otherwise. The DPLA uses what they call the Hub Model made up of Service Hubs and Content Hubs to aggregate metadata from their partners and contribute it to DPLA. This allows state and regional collaborations to onboard small institutions, adding online texts, photographs, manuscript material, artwork and more.