The latest issues of “This Week at the Illinois State Library” contain posts about work underway to establish the library as a Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) service hub that will supply DPLA with “Illinois” content and metadata from a variety of sources located around the state.
What is a service hub?
DPLA service hubs are state, regional, or other collaborations that host, aggregate, or otherwise bring together digital objects from libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural heritage institutions. State and regional hubs agree to collect content that describes their local history, but also content about the US broadly and, when available, international topics.
From the State Library Newsletter:
Adding the DPLA means greater exposure of digital content and enhanced access to collections through “maximally open data.” The State Library will manage the coordination and administrative aspects of the project. The Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Illinois (CARLI) has agreed to assist the library by providing technical support and computer hosting.
The next step is to convene a meeting with Illinois cultural heritage organizations that have digital assets, including libraries, museums, historical societies and archives. The goal of the meeting is to develop a robust action plan that will map out aggregation of the metadata from all interested Illinois cultural heritage organizations. Illinois cultural heritage organization representatives and staff members who are familiar with their organization’s digital assets and associated metadata are encouraged to attend this meeting. Please limit your organization’s representation to a maximum of two staff members.
The meeting will be held on Thursday, November 13, 2014, 10 a.m.–3 p.m. at the Newberry Library in Chicago.
Finally, an Illinois DPLA blog has been established.
See Also: Illinois Digital Archives (via Illinois State Library)
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