UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Pennsylvania now has its own online hub through the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), thanks to a statewide partnership including Penn State’s University Libraries. DPLA’s Pennsylvania Service Hub will enable greater access to digital images, text, maps, audio and visual files from libraries, archives, museums and special collections across the state for use in K-12 and higher education, research, genealogy, and for personal interest.
DPLA is a platform that brings together the riches of America’s libraries, archives and museums, and makes them freely available to the world. The new Service Hub, called PA Digital, launched on April 13 led by the State Library of Pennsylvania, Temple University, Penn State, the University of Pennsylvania, the Free Library of Philadelphia, the Pennsylvania Academic Library Consortium, the Health Sciences Libraries Consortium, the Interlibrary Delivery Service of Pennsylvania, the Philadelphia Consortium of Special Collections Libraries, and a variety of cultural heritage institutions from across the Commonwealth. The Service Hub includes select digital collections from partner libraries ranging from academic to K-12 to special collections and archives.
“Our statewide collaboration on PA Digital is the result of hundreds of hours of coding and alignment of metadata, including work by several Penn State librarians, catalogers and content strategists,” Barbara I. Dewey, dean of University Libraries and Scholarly Communications, said. “The establishment of Pennsylvania’s Service Hub is just the beginning, as more of our unique collections are being added for the public’s open access. I look forward to learning about the many ways Pennsylvania’s collective presence in DPLA advances research and discovery.”
Developers are able to use the DPLA’s application programming interface (API) to create custom mobile apps and widgets that can make use of DPLA’s and Pennsylvania’s data to aggregate, highlight and enhance the discovery of digital cultural heritage materials collections, such as Culture Collage or Serendip-o-Matic.
Penn State University Libraries' first contributions to DPLA are the Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps and the Thomas W. Benson Political Protest Collection. To see all of the University Libraries' 2,430 digital records contributed to DPLA so far, visit this DPLA search result.
DPLA and PA Digital content can be found at http://dp.la.