Created by Hannah Stitzlein, June 2018
Note: This guide is now deprecated and is not being maintained regularly. For more up-to-date information on the IDHH project, please see the IDHH website.
The Illinois Digital Heritage Hub (IDHH) is the Illinois service hub to the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). The IDHH is a partnership between the Illinois State Library (ISL), Chicago Public Library (CPL), the Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Illinois (CARLI), and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). The IDHH went live in DPLA in January 2017 and continues to be a thriving member of the DPLA community.
DPLA Service Hubs are "...state or regional collaborations that aggregate metadata from libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural heritage institutions. … Service Hubs provide DPLA with their partners’ unique metadata records that resolve to digital objects (online texts, photographs, manuscript material, artwork, etc.) through a single data feed, such as OAI-PMH. They serve as the point of contact for the maintenance and enhancement of metadata records." (from the DPLA webpage)
As of December 2019, over 150 Illinois institutions participate in the IDHH and provide access to more than 320,000 rich and unique digital cultural heritage resources from across the state of Illinois.
Libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural heritage institutions from anywhere in Illinois that would like to contribute to the IDHH can share access to their digital collections’ metadata through OAI-PMH.
If your digital collections are already part of CARLI Digital Collections or the Illinois Digital Archive, please speak with your contact at CARLI or the Illinois State Library, respectively, to find out how to participate.
All other institutions should begin by completing the Contributor Agreement form and returning it to Sandra Fritz, IDHH Coordinator. Once the Contributor Agreement form has been completed, IDHH staff will work with your institution to gather technical information about your collections and metadata and begin testing.
Institutions provide their metadata to IDHH, usually via OAI-PMH v. 2.0. If your system is capable of providing an OAI feed but you’re not sure how to set it up, we can help. If your system is unable to provide an OAI feed or if you’re unsure, we can also accept XML files. All metadata should be mapped to Qualified Dublin Core. If your metadata is not currently mapped to Qualified Dublin Core, we can work with you to begin this process.
The IDHH uses the open-source application REPOX to harvest and aggregate collection metadata from all Data Providers in the state of Illinois. DPLA then harvests a single stream of all aggregated metadata from the IDHH REPOX server for inclusion in the DPLA public site.
When contributors make their metadata available to the IDHH, they are making it possible for users around the globe to access items in their collections through the DPLA portal. During the process of contribution, we will analyze the metadata of collections contributed to the IDHH and provide you with a review of your collections’ metadata and make recommendations on how the metadata can be represented in the best way possible in the DPLA environment.