Prospective Hubs

The DPLA Hubs Model is establishing a national network of digital libraries in the United States. Currently, this network consists of Service Hubs and Content Hubs. Service Hubs are collaborations that aggregate metadata from their partners–libraries, museums, archives, and cultural heritage institutions within their state or region–and contribute it to DPLA. Content Hubs are individual institutions with very large digital collections. Through this collaboration, DPLA and our Hubs bring together millions of records about digital texts, photographs, manuscript materials, artwork, and more available for use through dp.la and our API.

The DPLA Hub Network is a unique nationwide collective working to bring the riches of our nation’s cultural heritage to a broad, engaged public. Together, we inspire collaboration and help build capacity among institutions of all types, sizes, and resource levels. As a network, we can achieve goals that each of us could not individually. The DPLA Hub Membership program allows us to fully realize this potential.

Interested in becoming a Hub? Find out how.

Service Hubs

DPLA Service Hubs are state or regional collaborations that aggregate metadata from libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural heritage institutions. Service Hubs may also offer other services, including hosting digital content, digitization, metadata creation or enhancement, professional development, and more. They may also provide community outreach programs to increase user awareness of their unique local and regional digital content.

Service Hubs provide DPLA with their partners’ unique metadata records that resolve to digital objects (online texts, photographs, manuscript material, artwork, etc.) through a single data feed, such as OAI-PMH. They serve as the point of contact for the maintenance and enhancement of metadata records.

Content Hubs

DPLA Content Hubs are large libraries, museums, archives, or other digital repositories that maintain a driect relationship with DPLA. Content Hubs, as a general rule, provide unique metadata records that resolve to digital objects (online texts, photographs, manuscript material, artwork, etc.) to DPLA, and commit to maintaining and enhancing those records as needed.

Aggregation

DPLA’s aggregation provides access to more than 47 million images, documents, videos, and other cultural heritage artifacts from more than 5,000 libraries, archives, and museums across the United States. Find out more about how DPLA’s aggregation works