DPLA Metadata Application Profile

DPLA Metadata Application Profile
Name	DPLA Metadata Application Profile
Abbreviation	DMAP
Developer	Digital Public Library of America
Released	2013
Type	Metadata profile
Based on	Dublin Core, BIBFRAME, Europeana Data Model
License	Open

DPLA Metadata Application Profile

The DPLA Metadata Application Profile is a metadata aggregation and normalization specification created to enable interoperability among cultural heritage Library of Congress, Smithsonian Institution, New York Public Library, National Archives and Records Administration, Harvard University collections and other institutions such as Princeton University, Yale University, University of California, Berkeley, Columbia University, University of Michigan, Boston Public Library, Chicago Public Library, California Digital Library, Stanford University, University of Pennsylvania, British Library, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, Vatican Library, Wellcome Library, Getty Research Institute, Newberry Library, American Philosophical Society, Library and Archives Canada, National Library of Australia, National Diet Library, National Library of Ireland, National Library of Scotland, British Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, J. Paul Getty Museum, Tate Modern, Victoria and Albert Museum, National Gallery (London), Rijksmuseum, Louvre, Hermitage Museum, Prado Museum, Museo Nacional del Prado, Museo Nacional de Antropología, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Cooper Hewitt, Brooklyn Museum, Seattle Art Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Cleveland Museum of Art, Detroit Institute of Arts and many state and local cultural heritage organizations.

Overview

The profile is designed to aggregate descriptive metadata from diverse providers including OCLC, Ex Libris, CONTENTdm, Omeka, Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, Europeana, BIBFRAME, MARC Standards Office, Z39.50, SRU/SRW, IIIF, Linked Data Platform, W3C, Internet Archive, HathiTrust and national bibliographic agencies such as Library of Congress Name Authority File and Virtual International Authority File. It maps disparate schemas to a common set of properties supporting discovery, reuse, and rights management across collections like those held by Getty Research Institute, Smithsonian Institution, National Gallery of Art, New York Public Library and Harvard Art Museums.

History and Development

Work on the profile began after the launch of the Digital Public Library of America initiative and collaborations with aggregators and standards bodies including Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, Europeana Foundation, OCLC Research, Library of Congress, National Endowment for the Humanities and technology partners such as Microsoft Research, Google Cultural Institute, Amazon Web Services, Stanford University Libraries, Princeton University Library, Yale University Library and Harvard Library. Early versions incorporated lessons from projects including Europeana Data Model, the British Library metadata harvest, the Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard, and national digitization programs like National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program and the Digital Public Library of America collaborations with regional service hubs such as Prairie Heritage, Mountain West Digital Library and New England Regional Fellowship Consortium.

Core Elements and Properties

The profile establishes core elements derived from Dublin Core Metadata Initiative and enriched with controlled vocabularies and authority files such as Library of Congress Subject Headings, Getty AAT, LOC Name Authority File, VIAF, Wikidata, ORCID, MusicBrainz, SNAC, GeoNames, ISO 3166, ISO 639, MARC21, BIBFRAME and digital preservation standards like PREMIS. Key properties include identifiers, titles, creators, dates, formats, subjects, spatial coverage, temporal coverage, rights statements linked to entities such as Creative Commons and government public domain policies like United States Copyright Office rulings, and provenance metadata compatible with tools from Archivematica and DuraCloud.

Implementation and Mapping

Implementations routinely map provider schemas (e.g., MARC21, MODS, EAD, METS, VRA Core, CDWA Lite, TEI) into the profile using crosswalks developed by practitioners at institutions such as New York Public Library, California Digital Library, University of Minnesota Libraries, OhioLINK, HathiTrust, Internet Archive and service hubs like Digital Commonwealth. Aggregation workflows use technologies like OAI-PMH, IIIF, RDF, JSON-LD, Elasticsearch, Solr, Fedora Commons, Blacklight, DSpace, Repository as a Service, Linked Open Data techniques and infrastructure provided by Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud Platform.

Governance and Maintenance

Governance involves stakeholder consultation among contributing institutions including national libraries, university consortia such as Association of Research Libraries, funders like Institute of Museum and Library Services, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Knight Foundation, and standards organizations such as W3C and Dublin Core Metadata Initiative. Maintenance activities are coordinated with technical teams from hubs and aggregators including OCLC, Princeton University, Harvard Library Lab, University of North Carolina, University of Illinois, Rutgers University and community feedback through workshops, code sprints and gatherings at venues like Digital Library Federation and conferences including American Library Association and Society of American Archivists meetings.

Use Cases and Applications

The profile supports discovery portals, digital exhibitions, research data citation, pedagogy and computational use cases across platforms such as JSTOR, Project MUSE, Google Books, HathiTrust Digital Library, Internet Archive, IIIF Image API implementations in museum collections, scholarly projects at Stanford University and University of Oxford, and public-facing sites produced by institutions like Boston Public Library and New York Public Library Digital Collections. It facilitates linked-data research involving resources from the Library of Congress, British Library, Bibliothèque nationale de France and others, enabling integration with authority files such as VIAF, Wikidata, Getty Vocabularies and identity platforms like ORCID.

Criticisms and Limitations

Critics from academic and technical communities including voices at MIT, Cornell University, UC Berkeley School of Information, University of Toronto, Columbia University, Dartmouth College, Brown University and independent practitioners note challenges in representing complex archival hierarchies, lossiness in crosswalks from MARC21 or EAD to the profile, uneven application of controlled vocabularies across contributors, governance inertia, and scalability concerns when integrating large corpora from partners like Google Cultural Institute, Internet Archive and national digitization programs. Interoperability with semantic web initiatives such as W3C standards and alignment with bibliographic frameworks like BIBFRAME remain ongoing work.

Category:Metadata standards