Ready to Participate?

Is your organization ready to contribute metadata records to the Digital Public Library of American (DPLA) through the PPC?
Review the steps below to begin the process. Contact us if you have any questions along the way.

PPC Digital Readiness Checklist

Review the PPC Digital Readiness Checklist below to determine if you meet the guidelines. [Adapted from PA Digital Readiness Checklist].

  1. Do you have digital collections that are publicly available? If not, see the Digital Collection Toolkit for digitization project planning and implementation.
  2. Is your institution willing and able to sign the PPC Service Hub Participation Agreement, agreeing to contribute your metadata to the DPLA under a CC0 license?
  3. Are your digital collections (images, texts, audio, video, etc.) available on a publicly accessible collections management system?
  4. Do the digital collections that you wish to share meet the DPLA’s current Collection Development Guidelines? The DPLA currently does not accept the following:
    • Most scholarly material (e.g., electronic theses, dissertations, and journal articles).
    • Finding aids or archival collection guides (e.g., EAD files)
    • Items that do not resolve to a publicly accessible URL (e.g., embargoed, hidden, or restricted files)
    • Datasets
  5. Does your Content Management System (CMS) have a way of sharing your collection metadata, for example through an OAI-PMH feed, API, xml export, or CSV file? (If you are unsure, please contact us.)
  6. Do each of the records in your collection include a unique title field and a valid rights statement? See the PPC Metadata Guidelines for further information on the DPLA requirements.
  7. Does your system store preview/thumbnail images of the objects in your collection?
  8. Are you able to provide, for each of your records, a link back to the record on your local site? (This link allows the DPLA portal to point back to each object in its local context.)
  9. Do you have a staff member who can work with PPC staff to address any issues related to sharing your collection metadata with the DPLA?

If you have any questions about the above considerations and/or are unsure if you meet the requirements for contributing to the PPC and the DPLA, please contact us. We are very willing to work with potential partners to fulfill the requirements listed above.