Readiness Checklist

1) Do you have digital collections that are publicly available? If not, see our More Resources for Digitization Projects page for digitization project planning and implementation.

2) Is your institution able and willing to sign a permission letter agreeing to contribute your metadata to the DPLA under a CC0 license? Here is the Agreement Letter Template to be used with your own institution’s name and letterhead, to be remitted to PALCI.

3) Are your digital collections (images, texts, audio, video, etc.) available on a publicly accessible site?

4) Do the digital collections that you wish to share meet the DPLA’s current Collecting Policy? The DPLA currently does not accept the following:

• Scholarly material (e.g. ETD’s, journal articles)
• Finding aids or archival collection guides (e.g. EAD files)
• Items that do not resolve to a publicly accessible URL (i.e. embargoed, hidden or restricted files. Note: PA Digital can help you restrict these items from harvest. Ask us!)

5) Is your Content Management System (CMS) configured to share your collection metadata through an OAI-PMH feed? [If not, please contact us for special instructions.]

6) Do each of the records in your collection include a unique title field and a valid rights statement? See the list of PA Digital metadata requirements for further information.

7) Does your system store preview/thumbnail images of the objects in your collection?

8) Are you able to provide, in each of your records, a link back to the record on your local site? [This link allows the DPLA portal to point back to each object in its local context.]

9) Do you have a staff member who can work with PA Digital staff and/or your data aggregator/Intermediate Provider (i.e. POWER Library, Keystone Library Network, et. al.) to address any issues related to sharing your collection metadata with the DPLA.