The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) enables the discovery of digitized content held by U.S. cultural heritage institutions by aggregating metadata contributed from participating organizations. The DPLA differs from other resource sharing networks by providing not only the locality of an item from a catalogue such as WorldCat but offers easy access to the digitized item itself. Particularly for smaller libraries, archives, and museums, including content in the DPLA makes that content much easier for users to discover, access, and contextualize than it would be otherwise. The DPLA uses what they call the Hub Model made up of Service Hubs and Content Hubs to aggregate metadata from their partners and contribute it to DPLA. This allows state and regional collaborations to onboard small institutions, adding online texts, photographs, manuscript material, artwork and more.

Based on the open-source IIIF image viewer Mirador 3, the Specialised Information Service Art, Photography, Design - arthistoricum.net, in cooperation with NFDI4Culture, the consortium for research data on material and immaterial cultural heritage, provides a platform for collaborative exploration of image resources. Within the virtual research environment, users can create their own workspaces and image collections individually or in groups, share them for collaborative efforts, and jointly create persistent annotations. This article outlines the development and integration process of this web-based research platform and highlights future areas of improvement.