“’The first phase of the project was about planning. We brought a lot of people together in meetings and created workstreams that tackled individual areas,’ explained Maura Marx, executive director of the Open Knowledge Commons, an affiliate of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School that is coordinating the DPLA. ‘So, we had people looking at user [experience], people looking at technology, people looking at content, etc.’
“Ideally, as the project grows, every state would eventually have one of these service hubs to coordinate the creation and dissemination of content in their geographic areas. The pilot program will also designate large, existing digital collections, such as the Internet Archive or the HathiTrust Digital Library as ‘content hubs’ and make their data available through DPLA.
“As these service and content hubs share data, another goal will be the development of a technological platform that will integrate collections from disparate sources. This is no simple task.
“’The big challenge in these kinds of initiatives has always been trying to figure out some way of creating a common metadata description scheme, or of mapping a metadata description scheme in a way that it’s possible to have consistent user experiences,’ Peter Brantley, the director of the Internet Archive’s Bookserver Project and DPLA committee member, told LJ.”
From Matt Enis’ article in the Library Journal, With New Funding, DPLA Sets Sights on Search