Chelcie Juliet Rowell
Digital Initiatives Librarian
Wake Forest University
Chris Freeland
Associate University Librarian
Washington University in St. Louis
A Pond Feeding a Lake Feeding an Ocean: Wake Forest University as a Contributing Institution to the Digital Public Library of America (Rowell)
Wake Forest University has begun contributing digital collections to the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) via the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center Service Hub. Each month, the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center aggregates OAI-PMH feeds of digital collections of contributing North Carolina institutions, and the DPLA in turn harvests this aggregation. Wake Forest is using participation in the DPLA as an opportunity to assess and clean up its metadata. Borrowing the principal of iterative and incremental development from the agile software development community, each monthly harvest is treated as a four-week development cycle during which small but meaningful improvements to metadata are identified and implemented (e.g. revising rights statement or populating the dc.date.created field). In contrast to a model that delivers a finished product only at the end of a project timeline, this approach allows the organization to immediately reap the benefits of participation in the DPLA, such as increased referrals to digital materials from the DPLA site and API.
Presentation (Rowell)
A Local Response to the National Digital Public Library of America (Freeland)
This project briefing will cover the technical and social frameworks needed locally to respond to a national effort like the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). By participating in DPLA, local cultural heritage organizations have the opportunity to promote the use of their digital collections to a broad audience and to interconnect their resources with related collections at national scale. New partnerships have to form where statewide infrastructures for the mobilization and delivery of digital objects do not already exist. Building from existing local ties, previously funded collaborations, and new additions through outreach, a group of librarians from cultural heritage organizations and libraries in the extended bi-state St. Louis metro area have started organizing the social and technical infrastructures needed to contribute materials to DPLA, as well as other portals and aggregators, where a larger regional infrastructure does not exist.
Presentation (Freeland)