These are the steps institutions take to become contributors to PA Digital:
- Interested/inquiring institution contacts our primary email address: info@padigital.org.
- PA Digital receives official request to onboard a new potential partner and adds that institution to a tracking and triage list.
- Repository-ready institutions can go directly to PA Digital Manager & Metadata Team for orientation, paperwork, interviews and data testing:
- PA Digital Manager explains overall principles and policies governing the PA Digital Hub.
- He/she provides the Contributing Institution Agreement Letter that will need to be signed by the new partner.
- The PA Digital Manager and Metadata Team communicates detailed requirements and guidelines to the new partner and works with them to determine harvesting requirements, based on a list of questions.
- The PA Digital Manager and Metadata Team ingests the new partner’s collections into the test aggregator, and assesses the content and metadata.
- Metadata Team provides feedback and works with new partner as needed to adjust settings or recommend metadata remediation. The new partner is also able to look at their own data in the test aggregator, which includes a faceted view, that acts as a powerful tool to detect metadata normalization problems.
- Metadata Team provides and/or suggests training as needed for new contributing institution to improve their metadata or description workflows.
- As metadata is improved, the PA Digital Manager or Metadata Team can easily re-ingest it as needed.
- Once the content is sufficiently adjusted, the PA Digital Manager or Metadata Team ingests it into the main production aggregator.
- New collections are then ingested into DPLA during the next regularly scheduled ingest phase, which generally occurs quarterly and will be determined by the DPLA and PA Digital.
- PA Digital Manager decides together with the new partner on an ongoing schedule for periodic data re-ingests to the Production Aggregator.
- Institutions who need a digital repository are forwarded to HSLC for the POWER Library.
- HSLC (POWER Library): support@hslc.org
- After their collections are successfully ingested into the POWER Library, HSLC or the new partner can contact us for ingest into the Testing and then the Production Aggregator for future release to the DPLA.
- Institutions who need digitization services can speak to the Metadata Team, who can forward them to the State Library for Scribe Scanner or other scanning support or who can provide additional guidelines/local information or referrals if appropriate.
- State Library: Bill Fee wfee@pa.gov
