Update: Colorado-Wyoming DPLA Service Hub

Colorado-Wyoming Service Hub of the Digital Public Library of America

Representatives from Colorado and Wyoming cultural heritage organizations are currently planning the creation of a Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) service hub. These service hubs are state, regional, or other collaborations that host and/or bring together digital objects from institutions within their respective communities. Planning for the service hub is being organized by the Colorado State Library. The planning and working groups include library, museum and archives professionals from a variety of institution types and geographic locations. With these varied perspectives we hope to create a service hub model that works for all of our diverse institutions. It is our hope that every institution in Colorado and Wyoming will have the opportunity to participate in the DPLA through this hub.

What is the DPLA?

The DPLA brings together (aggregates) descriptive information about collection material from libraries, archives, and museums, and makes it freely available to the world while at the same time directing that traffic back to the owning institution. Currently this national online portal has:

  • 14 million + collections resources from libraries, archives and museums
  • 21 service hubs (soon to be 25) and 16 content hubs that include more than 2,057 institutional partners from across the United States

What the DPLA can do for your collections

Sharing your collection information with DPLA gives you the ability to:

  • Place your institution on the same national playing field as others
  • Increase traffic to your collections and therefore your institution
  • Create collection-based educational sets
  • Develop online exhibits
  • Build a community around individual collections
  • Establish a platform for underrepresented groups

Colorado-Wyoming Service Hub Planning

Planning for the service hub began in earnest in May 2016 when the Digital Collections Planning Group (DCPG) met for the first time. Since then, technology and metadata working groups were formed to create and prototype the hub’s dark aggregator and to explore and eventually create metadata standards for the hub. All three groups came together in late September to meet with staff from the DPLA, and work out a strategy for moving forward.

The group discussed the proposed Colorado-Wyoming hub plan. This plan outlines the anticipated responsibilities of the Colorado State Library, the partner organizations and the continued work of the initial planning groups and eventual governance group. We propose to do the hub work in three initial phases. Phase one will include six organizations that will help determine hub processes, workflows and will provide the initial feed to DPLA. The hub will add more partners in phases two and three. During the initial phases of the hub we will grow our service hub model, which is made up of Content Hubs, institutions that will provide content and hub participation support to other institutions; Community Support Hubs, organizations that will provide hub outreach to the institutions they represent; and Content Nodes, institutions that will only supply content to the hub.

The DPLA hub application has been submitted and is currently being review by the DPLA. If you have any questions about or would like to participate in the Colorado-Wyoming DPLA Service Hub initiative we would love to hear from you. Please contact me, Leigh Jeremias, at ljeremias@coloradovirtuallibrary.org. For more information about our progress please explore our other posts on this planning page.  We will continue to update this page as we move through the hub process.