Join us

Digital Virginias is the official DPLA service hub for institutions in Virginia and West Virginia providing content to the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). There’s plenty of opportunities to get involved, and the Digital Virginias hub team is available to guide you.

DPLA operates on two key factors — online digital collections and standardized metadata. Getting your institution’s content into the DPLA depends upon having publicly available, online digital content with metadata that meets the standard profile.

Are you interested in DPLA, and don’t know where to begin?

Please fill out this contact form and a Digital Virginias team member will be in touch.

How to share your content

1. Identify collections

Collections should:

  • Align with our collections guidelines
  • Be available online with a stable URL
  • Be available for use without authentication, firewall, paywall, or other restriction
  • Support the educational, recreational, and information needs of the people of Virginia and West Virginia

2. Create or update metadata

3. Transform and deposit

Export, transform, and deposit your collections metadata to the Digital Virginias GitHub repository for ingest into DPLA.

Need help, or not sure you meet all the requirements?

Digital Virginias understands that we all may not be able to meet these expectations at every step. We are here to help you understand what it will take to make your collections available. Use the Contact Us form to ask your questions, find out more, and determine how Digital Virginias may be able to help you digitize, describe, and make your materials available online. We strive to be as inclusive as possible with our work and would like you as part of that effort.

Interested in learning more?

Please fill out the contact form and a Digital Virginias team member will be in touch.

In the meantime, you can join our mailing list to stay up to date!

New to digital collections?

Get started with the basic overview.