About

Empire State Digital Network, a service hub of the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), shares New York’s rich digital cultural heritage with the DPLA. The Network is administered by the Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO) in collaboration with eight allied regional library councils collectively working as the Empire State Library Network. Together, they provide the necessary personnel and technological infrastructure to contribute digital resources from hundreds of New York’s libraries, archives, museums, and cultural heritage institutions to the DPLA.

Service hubs

DPLA service hubs are state or regional organizations that aggregate information about digital objects from libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural heritage institutions within a given state or region. Service Hubs offer their state or regional partners a suite of standardized digital services, including digitization, metadata, data aggregation and storage services, as well as locally hosted community outreach programs, bringing users in contact with digital content of local relevance.

Background

Empire State Digital Network was announced as a DPLA service hub in October 2013 at DPLAfest. Since then, ESDN staff has been laying the groundwork to aggregate content from existing state and regional digital collection projects.

A full list of current contributors is available here.

See our timeline for more detailed project information.

What we do

ESDN is a content aggregator. We collect metadata from non-profit cultural heritage organizations throughout the state of New York, including libraries, archives, historical societies, and museums for the purpose of sharing that data with the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA).

Our process works something like this:

Aggregation slide

We receive data from many providers, usually via OAI-PMH. We bring all of that data together into an aggregation tool where we apply transformations that normalize it into a single stream to be harvested by DPLA.

All metadata shared with DPLA is done so under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) Public Domain Dedication. ESDN does not claim ownership of the metadata it collects. Collection contributors may request that their materials be removed from DPLA at any time.

See the For Contributors section of this site for detailed information about contribution guidelines and requirements.