DPLA’s Innovative Platform: Exhibits,

Primary Source Sets, Ebooks and API

searchingKeila Zayas Ruiz, Sunshine State Digital Network Coordinator

What is DPLA?

•A free, national digital library that provides access to materials from libraries, archives, and museums across the US•A network of partners who make their content available through a single website

What Does DPLA Offer?

•Cultural heritage materials•Rich and varied primary sources•American history and culture and more

What does DPLA Offer?

•National and local sources•Vetted and described by information professionals

+

What is SSDN?

● DPLA Service Hub for FL. ○ This means we provide partner metadata to DPLA and offer tiered

services to partners.○ We have shared nearly 215,000 records to date from 14 contributors

● We are a network. ○ New approach to collaborative digital library work in Florida○ We work collaboratively and share resources among sub hubs and

content contributors. ○ We also have 56 working group members representing 36 different

institutions working to promote, train, and create standards.

● Florida State University, University of Miami, Florida International University initial hub implementation leads

● Strong partnership with DLIS

Where to Start? User Guides

Example: American Civil War

Example: Politics of the Union list

Create Lists

Create Lists

Create Lists

●Topic-based “highlight reels”

Topical collections of primary source letters, photographs, posters, oral histories,

video clips, sheet music, and more.

●For Middle School through Higher Ed

Designed to be used in grades 6-12 and the early years of higher education

●By Teachers, For Teachers & Students

Created by secondary and collegiate educators on DPLA’s Education Advisory

Committee

●Interdisciplinary topics

100+ topics in US history, American literature, World History, History of Science & Technology, and Arts

What are the DPLA Primary Source Sets?

Finding the right DPLA Primary Source Set

Subjects, such as:● US History, American Literature, World

History● Migration, Women, Native Americans,

Science and Technology

Time Period, such as:● Civil War and Reconstruction● Great Depression & World War II

Finding the right DPLA Primary Source Set

You can use filters to browse Primary Source Sets by:

Courtesy of Atlanta History Center via Digital Library of Georgia

Main page of a Primary Source Set

Source page within a set

Tips for Searching DPLA

Search Tips

Exact phrases: enclose with quotation marks

Boolean operators: Combine multiple search terms using OR

or NOT. (Default behavior is AND.)

Wildcards: Use an asterisk (*) as a substitute for any collection

of characters within a word.

Remember that no search engine is Google (except Google).

Sample Searches

Woman and women in keywords will get different results. Wom*n can solve this!

Ellis Island vs. “Ellis Island” - what do you see?

Consider all the different ways you might search for World War II using keywords. (World War 2 vs. World War II vs. ww2….etc.)

https://dp.la

DPLA API

DPLA Ebooks

A Platform to Build Upon

Historical Cats

http://mwdlnews.blogspot.com/2014/06/how-to-make-your-very-own-dpla-twitter.html

The essentialsNeed to start right now? Here’s a cheat sheet.

https://api.dp.la/v2 is the base URL of the DPLA API. items and collections are the two resource types you can request. In order to pass requests to the API, you’ll need to request an API key first. You also need to

append &api_key=$YOUR_KEY (where $YOUR_KEY is your 32-character key) to any requests you make.

All records are returned as structured, wonderful, JSON-LD objects. And we have reasons for that.

We’ve got a boatload of fields you can query, and a whole bunch of ways you can query them.

Dive head first into a bucket full of kitten metadata: https://api.dp.la/v2/items?q=kittens&api_key=. (Copy and paste the URL into your browser and add your API key on the end.)

DPLA API Resources

● API Basics● How to get an API Key● API Requests● More

Thank you!Questions?