As the newly-formed Pennsylvania Digital Collections Project (PDCP) was preparing to become a DPLA Service Hub for the state of Pennsylvania, we developed a Hydra-based aggregator to begin ingesting digital content. We then went on to deploy it in production and release the code in open source on GitHub.
In this session, we will describe the technical implementation of this aggregator, as well as the role it played as a tool for data review, normalization and remediation both for the contributing institutions and the implementation team. Furthermore we will describe how this aggregator significantly increased buy-in among all project participants, by making the project more tangible and attainable. It also greatly facilitated communication with multiple stakeholders and helped with outreach. The aggregator’s features include DPLA-friendly metadata enhancement, OAI-PMH support, an alternative ingest workflow for repositories without OAI-PMH support, an easy to use interface for metadata harvesting, detailed ingest logs, a web preview interface, and much more!
