For almost five years, CLRC has participated in the New York State Service Hub for the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). Over these years, we’ve worked with our state partners to facilitate the addition of 443,200 records from about 200 organizations to DPLA, making many primary source artifacts from New York State more discoverable on the web. Despite these results and a great deal of investment in the service, the New York State service hub will no longer be operational beginning in July 2019 due to a lack of sustainable funding.
We are working on a new arrangement with DPLA to resume harvesting of metadata. However, this will likely be a lengthy process, and there is no guarantee that a new arrangement can be reached.
New York Heritage is as strong as ever, and there will not be any changes to any of CLRC’s other services, including our Access & Digitization Grants. Materials from CLRC’s contributors can still show up in DPLA, they just won’t be updated after this May. I’m working with our content contributors directly to manage a final harvest of metadata for DPLA.
More information about the decision to shutdown the service hub is available in this blog post from the Metropolitan New York Library Council: https://medium.com/@metrolibcouncil/sunsetting-esdn-in-july-2019-b892e3da2ecc
This is very discouraging news but our goal is to make this a temporary pause in our participation in DPLA.
DPLA issued this statement:
DPLA was saddened to hear about the Empire State Digital Network’s decision to sunset as a DPLA service hub. However, we understand and respect METRO’s decision to do so.
We are committed to doing what we can to ensure the continued presence of New York’s rich cultural heritage holdings in DPLA, and are actively in discussions with other interested stakeholders. DPLA aims to coordinate with the constituent organizations in New York to form a successor hub to carry forward, in a sustainable manner, the work of contributing to DPLA. We plan to convene a conversation with current contributing organizations in May to discuss the formation of a successor hub.
In the meantime, ESDN is working to contribute a last harvest to DPLA in June, in order to ensure that New York’s holdings continue to be represented in DPLA. We thank them for that work, and for all of their work to build a hub and be part of the DPLA network.
Anticipating moving forward with you all– if you have any questions, please reach out to me at michele.kimpton@dp.la.
Michele Kimpton
DPLA
