DPLA Welcomes Three New Service Hubs to its Growing Collections: New York, North Carolina, Texas
October 24, 2013
Boston, MA – The Digital Public Library of America announced the addition of three new Service Hubs today at a reception celebrating the April 2013 launch of the DPLA and the start of DPLAfest, a two-day series of events free and open to the public taking place in Boston on October 24-25, 2013. The three new Service Hubs – Empire State Digital Network (New York), The Portal to Texas History (Texas), and the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center (North Carolina) – will bring hundreds of thousands of new digital materials into the DPLA collections in the weeks and months following the DPLAfest festivities.
The DPLA Service Hubs are state or regional digital libraries that aggregate information about digital objects from libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural heritage institutions within their given state or region. Each Service Hub offers its state or regional partners a full menu of standardized digital services, including digitization, metadata, data aggregation and storage services, as well as locally hosted community outreach programs, bringing users in contact with digital content of local relevance.
“Service hubs are a critical part of DPLA’s networked model, which relies on collaboration across the country,” said Dan Cohen, DPLA’s executive director. “Adding these terrific partners in three large states means that model will accelerate, bringing ever more of America’s collections to the world. We are lucky to have Empire State Digital Network, the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center, and the Portal to Texas History join us in our mission.”
These new Service Hubs represent the geographic and cultural diversity of the expanding DPLA collections:
Empire State Digital Network (New York)
Empire State Digital Network is the first service hub to be created explicitly as a means for sharing New York’s rich digital cultural heritage with the DPLA. The Network will be administered by the Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO) in collaboration with eight allied regional library councils collectively working as NY3Rs Association. Together, they will provide the necessary personnel and technological infrastructure needed to contribute digital resources from hundreds of New York’s libraries, archives, museums, and cultural heritage institutions to the Digital Public Library of America.
North Carolina Digital Heritage Center (North Carolina)
The North Carolina service hub will be managed by the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center. The Center will aggregate metadata from institutions across North Carolina — including public and private universities, state agencies, public libraries, and museums — to be shared with the DPLA. More than 130 different cultural heritage institutions will be represented. The North Carolina Digital Heritage Center is a statewide digitization and digital publishing program supported by the State Library of North Carolina and housed in the North Carolina Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The Portal to Texas History (Texas)
The Portal to Texas History is a digital gateway to historical materials from private collectors and collaborative partners from across the state of Texas, including libraries, museums, archives, and other historical groups. Hosted by the University of North Texas, The Portal to Texas History consists of more than 300,000 digital items from over 250 partners. Collections of note include Amarillo Daily News, National Museum of the Pacific War Oral History Collection, Map Collections from the University of Texas at Arlington, Austin History Center General Collection Photographs, Texas Digital Newspaper Program, and many more.
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About the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA)
The Digital Public Library of America (http://dp.la/) strives to contain the full breadth of human expression, from the written word, to works of art and culture, to records of America’s heritage, to the efforts and data of science. Since launching in April 2013, it has aggregated over 5 million items from over 1,000 institutions. The DPLA is a registered 501(c)(3) non-profit.
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