The Oklahoma State University Library continues to lead collaborative efforts with state archival repositories and cultural heritage organizations to make significant contributions to the Digital Public Library of America.

The DPLA is a single-point search engine for national cultural heritage material. Regional and state institutions collaborate to create a hub of contributors, producing collections that the public can access freely through the DPLA website at the website. In 2017, OSU was a driving force in the creation of the OKHub. The hub allowed managing partners, the OSU Library, the University of Oklahoma Libraries, the Oklahoma Historical Society and the Oklahoma Department of Libraries to share state history with DPLA.

OSU’s Oklahoma Oral History Research Program head, Sarah Milligan, and the University of Oklahoma’s Tara Carlisle lead the statewide collaboration. Each institution plays an important role in managing the OkHub. The OU team harvests metadata from participants’ systems; OSU then checks the metadata. ODL and OHS conduct outreach to various organizations seeking complementary resources to complete the collection.

“The whole setup contributes to the university's land grant mission; it is collaborative and completely outward-facing,” Milligan said. OSU alone has made 15,293 contributions to the hub and will continue to share its resources.

Oklahoma organizations with publicly accessible online cultural heritage collections can contribute to DPLA by contacting the organizers of the OKHub.

To learn more about OSU’s contributions to DPLA, contact Sarah Milligan at sarah.milligan@okstate.edu or 405-744-9778.

Story By: Madison Duffy | madison.duffy@okstate.edu