“The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) brings together the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums (LAMs), and makes them freely available to the world. LAMs share much in common, but can differ widely in description practices. Archives, in particular, differ from the other two in the use of hierarchical description that situates materials within the context of other records or documents that share the same provenance. The principle that records should be kept together and maintained in the original order in which they were created or assembled (as far as possible) is referred to as respect des fonds and is a fundamental principle of archival arrangement and description. The classic example of this type of description is the finding aid, a single document that describes the intellectual organization of a collection. The collection is described overall along with details of pertinent historical or biographical note. The materials are then described as part of one or more groupings of related documents, and those groups can be further described in sub-groupings or even down to individual items in some cases. There are a number of finding aid-centered aggregation sites, including ArchiveGrid and state or regional sites like Online Archive of California, and Texas Archival Resources Online. This model of description is laid out in Describing Archives: A Content Standard (DACS) and is widely used in archives and special collections. The technological infrastructure of DPLA, on the other hand, has been centered on the item-centric library model for description: one metadata record for each individual digital “object.” Indeed this is the most common model for digital repositories and library systems, has been so for some time, and doesn’t show signs of becoming less popular. While DACS does in some ways address archival description in the online environment, traditionally there were few digital repositories that could take advantage of the contextual information and relationships afforded by using the content standard.”