OSU Library leads effort to share digital resources
Monday, April 27, 2020
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, creating a hub of contributors, to produce collections that can be freely accessed by the public through the DPLA website, https://dp.la/. In 2017, OSU was a driving force in the creation of the OKHub. The hub allowed managing partners, the OSU Library, University of Oklahoma Libraries, 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 University of Oklahoma’s Tara Carlisle spearhead 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 complimentary resources to complete the collection.
“The whole set up 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 their resources.
Oklahoma organizations with publically accessible online cultural heritage collections can contribute to DPLA by contacting the organizers of the OKHub. Milligan and Carlisle have produced a webinar on how to make contributions to the OKHub, which can be found at https://okarchivists.org/continuing-education/.
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, Communications Graduate Research Assistant
MEDIA CONTACT: Bonnie Ann Cain-Wood | OSU Library | 405-744-7331 | lib-pub@okstate.edu