Karen Estlund
Associate Dean for Technology and Digital Strategies, Libraries
Pennsylvania State University
Declan Fleming
Chief Technology Strategist and Director of Information Technology Services, Library
University of California, San Diego
Mark Matienzo
Director of Technology
Digital Public Library of America
Jon Stroop
Library Applications Development Manager
Princeton University
Interoperability has long been a goal of digital repositories, as demonstrated by efforts ranging from the Open Archives Initiative – Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), to attempts to create common application programming interfaces (APIs) such as the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF), to community based metadata standards such as Dublin Core. As repositories have matured and the desire to work more collaboratively and reuse source code has grown, the need for a common understanding of how digital objects are conceived and represented is essential. The Portland Common Data Model (PCDM) is an effort to create a shared, linked data-based model for representing complex digital objects. Starting in the Hydra community but quickly expanding to include contributors from Islandora, Fedora, the Digital Public Library of America, and other repository-related service communities, PCDM is the result of over 60 practitioners’ contributions to a shared model for structuring digital objects. The process was holistic and rooted in concrete use-cases. An initial in-person meeting in Portland, Oregon in fall 2014 resulted in the release of the first draft of the data model for which it is named. With this shared model, we intend to further the goal of interoperability across repositories and related technologies. This presentation will review the origins of PCDM, provide a general technical overview, update on current status, and forecast future work.