How to Participate
Administrative Requirements
- Review the General Information page.
- Review the Technical and Metadata Requirements for participation.
- Contact the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center. Have the following information handy.
- A single name for your institution as you’d like it represented in the DPLA.
- URL(s) where users can view your institution’s digital collection(s).
- Digital collection OAI feed URL(s).
- The sets (collections) your institution would like to share.
- The name, email address, and phone number of one or two contacts at your institution who will be able to answer (1) technical questions related to your OAI feed and (2) questions related to your institution’s metadata practices.
- We will attempt to ingest the feeds you provide. Your institution will be given feedback about how the feeds performed in relation to the DPLA’s requirements. In certain cases, you may need to make adjustments to your metadata before it can be included. See Metadata Review for examples of the types of feedback you may receive.
- Once you have made changes, if necessary, we will review your feeds again. If the metadata conforms to the DPLA’s requirements, we will include your feeds in the next DPLA harvest.
Technical Requirements
Metadata for your institution’s digital resources must be expressed in Dublin Core, and sharable via an OAI-PMH feed. If your metadata is only sharable via other means, contact the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center.
In order to uniformly distribute metadata from a diverse set of institutions, the Digital Heritage Center will be encoding all received metadata in MODS before it is shared with the DPLA.
Metadata Requirements
The DPLA requires few metadata elements. A number of additional elements are optional. See the Metadata Requirements document.
Metadata Review
After we review your institution’s feeds, we may discuss the following types of changes with you to make sure your metadata is exposed accurately:
- Metadata fields may need to be mapped to specific Dublin Core elements.
- Required fields may need to be populated.
- Institutions may choose to add metadata to recommended or optional fields.
- Institutions may want to adjust the contents of fields that they feel aren’t descriptive enough when viewed via the DPLA. For example, you may choose to change a collection name from “Campus Photos” to “Acme University Campus Photos.”
Adding and Removing Your Metadata
It is each institution’s individual responsibility to contact the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center when you add collections you’d like to share through the DPLA.
Likewise, you should do the same if you wish to discontinue sharing all or part of your metadata with the DPLA. Be aware that there may be a delay between notifying the Digital Heritage Center and the content being removed from the DPLA.