Submitted by Ben Goldman

In September 2014, Patricia Hswe and Ben Goldman attended the Pennsylvania Digital Collections Summit at the Free Library in Philadelphia, which was focused on the possibility of organizing digital collections efforts in Pennsylvania, with the ultimate goal of getting PA digital collections into the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) . This meeting, attended by representatives from libraries across the state, resulted in the formation of a “PA DPLA Founders” group, whose aim is to establish a Pennsylvania Service Hub for onboarding PA digital collections into DPLA. In addition to serving as one of the PA DPLA founders, Penn State University Libraries is also contributing resources for technical development on an aggregator tool that collects metadata from institutions across the state and stages it for DPLA, as well as informing metadata practices. At present, the plan is for Pennsylvania to apply as a service hub in the Summer of 2015, which would likely result in the first complete ingest of statewide assets by the end of 2015.

In order to support the development of the statewide service hub and coordinate the local effort needed to prepare local content for ingest into DPLA, Dean Dewey has formally charged a DPLA Working Group. Chaired by Patricia Hswe and Ben Goldman, the working group includes Mohamed Berray, Linda Ballinger, and Andrew Gearhart. Stakeholders for the group include: Annie Copeland, Sue Kellerman, Brandy Karl, Henry Pisciotta, Tim Pyatt, Linda Klimczyk, Linda Friend and Sabra Statham.

The full charge for this working group can be found at https://wikispaces.psu.edu/display/DPLAWG. This wiki will be used by the group to document its work throughout the year, so check back often.

For more information on DPLA efforts at the state level, please see this announcement from PALCI: https://sites.psu.edu/librarynews/2015/02/16/pa-library-leaders-announce-new-initiative-to-increase-access-to-digital-collections/.