DPLA Accounts: Save and Share

By Hillary Brady, April 2, 2014.
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The DPLA has so many unique features that make searching its records easy, intuitive, and useful. Among them is a feature that lets you create your own DPLA account—here’s how you can and what you can do with it.

Signing up is as easy as clicking “Sign Up” on the top toolbar, entering your e-mail and choosing a password. A confirmation e-mail will be sent to your address—once you click on the link provided, you’ve got your very own DPLA account ready and activated.

Creating your account is simple. But, now that you have your account, what can you use it for? It’s most useful purpose is being able to save content that you find on the site to your account. That way, if you’re researching a topic or just find something really fascinating in your perusal of the collection, you can bookmark it to go back to at any time.

Another feature is being able to share your own curated content—saved searches, bookmarked items, your own “lists”—with others.

To save your content, all you have to do is hit the orange “save” button on the right hand side of your screen. This can be in the form of whole searches. For instance, if you search for “winter,” you can then click save on the right hand side of the screen. That search, and all its results, will be saved to your DPLA account.  The same goes for any filters applied to that search—if you limit the “winter” search to a specific partner hub or format, all that can be saved in your search, too.

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You can also save specific items, as well. When you find an item you love or that you’d like to take a look at again soon, just hit the “save to” button on the right hand side of the page. You can either save to “Your Saved Items,” which pulls together every item you’ve saved, or a list that you create yourself.

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Creating a list is as easy as hitting your username at the top right hand side of the DPLA toolbar. That will bring you back to your profile, where all of your saved content is housed—items, lists and searches. Click the “Saved Items & Lists” tab.  On the left hand side, under “Your Lists,” click the “Add New” button. Then, you can list a title and description.

For example, say you want to create a list from your “winter” search of just certain images. You can title this “Snowy Scenes,” and include a description labeling what the list contains. You can make your list private or choose to make it public, so the list can be shared. Once you’re done, click “Save.”

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Now, you can access this list through your profile, or can save items directly to it. When you click on an item to save, you’ll have the option of saving it to your saved items, or to the “Snowy Scenes” list.

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You can edit this list too, just by going back to your profile and clicking on the list. To reorder, select the items on the left, and enter their numerical ranking in the box to the right. Hit “reorder” at the bottom of the page. Remove by selecting the item and clicking “Remove.”

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Once you’re done editing your list and you’d like to share it with friends and fellow researchers, just copy the URL at the top of your window and paste it into an e-mail. Now, take a look at “Snowy Scenes” and be inspired to make your own!


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