The Sunshine State Digital Network (SSDN) is the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) service hub for the state of Florida. The DPLA is an ever-growing national network of libraries, archives, museums, cultural heritage institutions; it is a free service, offering access to over 21 million items from around the globe. The service hub (SSDN) represents a community of institutions in the state which provides their partner institutions’ aggregated metadata for the DPLA and offer tiered services, such as collections hosting, metadata remediation, training, and digitization assistance to connect institutions of all sizes to the DPLA. Collecting (aggregating) and sharing the metadata records with DPLA allows for the digital objects to be presented to the public in a national context alongside objects from other organizations like the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, the National Archives, Harvard University, HathiTrust, and many others and gives them greater exposure. This means that they are easier to find because they are all on one easily searchable platform and they will get more use than they would have otherwise. DPLA offers users many ways to make use of the resources they provide such as exhibitions and primary source sets designed for classroom use.
The SSDN operates on a multi-tiered hub system consisting of the main hub and regional sub-hubs. The main service hub is located at Florida State University in Tallahassee, FL. The sub-hub is located in Miami, FL with responsibilities shared among the University of Miami (UM) and Florida International University (FIU). These three institutions contribute metadata for their digital collections content as well as on behalf of several new content partners. SSDN has added three new content partners since February 2018, they are Florida Memory, the City of Coral Gables, and Valclav Havel Library Foundation. Together, these six institutions have shared over 148,000 digital objects with DPLA since our first harvest in November 2017!
The network is currently working toward adding more partners, developing a sustainability model, establishing governance, and supporting Florida cultural heritage institutions to share their resources online. We are doing this with the help of many volunteers around the state serving on our working groups, which focus on metadata, outreach, and training. These groups are currently developing metadata guidelines and documentation, assessing and developing digitization, digital collections, and metadata training, and creating and fostering outreach and relationships with different cultural heritage institutions around the state. We are very excited about the growth of the network in such a short time and about the opportunities we have ahead of us.
Take a look at what Florida has contributed to DPLA and explore what else DPLA has to offer at dp.la.
Post contributed by Keila Zayas-Ruiz, SSDN Coordinator based at Florida State University in Tallahassee.
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