- August 2014 — A group representing various Pennsylvania libraries and cultural heritage institutions met to discuss enhancing support for PA digital collections by exposing them to the DPLA through an official Service Hub in the state of Pennsylvania. This meeting sparked the Pennsylvania Digital Collections Project for the DPLA which eventually became known as PA Digital.
- October 2014 — Temple University Libraries began working on a simple proof-of-concept metadata harvesting aggregator Hydra head, to investigate Hydra’s viability for powering a DPLA Service Hub that could be made generic enough to share across Service Hubs and supporting institutions. The successful prototype included rudimentary functionality for harvesting metadata from, simple sanitizing it, and exposing it through OAI-PMH and Blacklight/Solr.
- December 2014 — Based on this early work, the PA Digital Developers Team consisting of developers from Penn State and Temple developed DPLAH, a Hydra head based on the October prototype.
- April 2015 — The refined and improved prototype was completed and shared with the PA Digital Teams, PA stakeholders, and the DPLA.
- July 2015 — An additional Developers’ code sprint was held to add more features and enhancements to the head based on feedback and work by the PA Digital Metadata Team and make it scalable / production-ready.
- August 2015 — Just about one year to the day from the initial meeting, with 147,100 records from 165 collections at 29 PA institutions, the PA Digital Service Hub was approved as the DPLA Service Hub for the state of Pennsylvania, with the Hydra-powered DPLAH as the software layer.
- November 2015 – March 2016 — Members of PA Digital are working with the DPLA to prepare for our content’s inclusion in the growing collections of the Digital Public Library of America.
- April 2016 — PA Digital goes live in the DPLA. Since them we have been steadily growing our collections.
- October 2016 — PA Digital started to explore how to better support the adoption of better copyright statements in line with rightsstatements.org, and to develop training materials to help institutions implement those new guidelines.
- October 2017 — PA Digital started developing primary source sets and their accompanying teaching guides, specifically targeting K-12 audience. PA Digital also formed the PA Digital Education Advisory Group.