2026 Conference Programs

An experiment in community-engaged digital humanities within the interstices of minimal computing, we explore the development of minimal archiving processes and a curation protocol rooted in ethical and sustainable memory care-work, while responding to the erasure of local memory and present-day community activism around nuclear guardianship.

This lightning talk shows how AI coding assistants helped transform a public history master’s project into an interactive website centered on a dataset of anti-Chinese racial terror. I discuss Cursor-assisted site development, ChatGPT-guided infrastructure, publication-ready visualizations, and a grounded Ask the Archive chatbot designed to prevent hallucinated cases and links.

Archivists at UVA’s Claude Moore Health Sciences Library replaced an outdated NAS with bit rot risks affecting PHI. Partnering with library and health system IT, they implemented a HIPAA-compliant DAS, secure workstation, and cloud storage. Migration is underway; this talk highlights requirements, workflows, collaboration, and ongoing data protection goals.

In this lighting talk James Rein, CCO at ResourceSpace, will explore what makes digital curation truly effective. Drawing on a case study from the Whitney Museum of American Art he’ll demonstrate how GLAM institutions are using digital curation practices to enhance engagement with their collections and how ResourceSpace facilitates that.

Metavus for Museums is a project extending Metavus, a free and open source digital collections platform, for the physical collections of arts and heritage organizations. Working with Bread and Puppet Theater, we adapted Metavus for their museum and archives. This talk shares ideas and takeaways from this project.

This lightening talk shares how one academic library produced digital storytelling artifacts to extend the reach of scholarship and engage community audiences. Drawing on video initiatives, I’ll position libraries as partners in digital research dissemination, offering a practice-based model for amplifying faculty work through creative production and community-centered collaboration.

This presentation covers the results of an environmental scan conducted by the Current Gaps in Tech Strategy subgroup of the DLF Technology Strategy for Archives (TS4A) Working Group on the current state of technological ecosystems in archival information systems in cultural heritage institutions across Canada and the United States.

This presentation shares how digital collection design and metadata gathering workflows helped enhance discovery of Latin American and Caribbean political ephemera. By capturing item-level metadata at scale and enabling cross-repository harvesting, the project integrates collections into broader networks, transforming ephemera into discoverable, interoperable data for sustained access and comparative scholarship.

This hands-on workshop introduces AACAT-1870 (African American Community Archives Theory) as a framework for mapping Black life beyond traditional archives. Participants will outline a StoryMap by layering African cultural memory, displacement, and archival records, using counter-mapping to address gaps, silences, and absences in digital storytelling and archival representation.

This interactive workshop is aimed at repository practitioners who want to understand and implement a modern Islandora repository using current best practices. Designed for repository managers, developers, and digital librarians, the session provides a practical and conceptual overview of contemporary Islandora architecture, metadata modeling, and interoperability considerations.

Data visualization is essential in library work, yet few practitioners receive formal training in it. This workshop equips library workers at any level with a practical foundation in the design of accessible and effective data visualizations, combining theory with hands-on practice, leaving participants with a framework they can immediately apply.

What do you do when a major source of funding is no longer available? This workshop provides an introduction to financial sustainability planning for digital projects, initiatives, collaboratives, and communities, equipping participants with a set of tools that can be used to gain your financial bearings and identify next steps.

Librarians and scholars from Virginia Tech and North Carolina State University and leadership from the Aqqaluk Trust, an Inuit-led community organization in Northwest Alaska, will present on a multi-day community archiving workshop held in Kotzebue, Alaska, guided by Indigenous data sovereignty principles.

Librarians collaborated to develop a workflow that utilized a local AI model to retrieve, scan, and create initial alt-text for all repository images to meet ADA Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 at the University of South Florida Libraries with a focus on privacy and ethical human review.

This presentation describes a collaborative, library-led digital storytelling project that empowers anthropology students to construct immersive documentary films. Through storyboarding, production, and editing, students highlight marginalized communities and collective identities while building digital literacy skills. Presenters share workflows, lessons learned, demonstrations, and suggestions for adapting this project at other institutions.

As AI transforms archival research, publishers must preserve context, provenance and trust. Join AM Quartex to explore how AI is being applied across the publishing lifecycle, from metadata enrichment and transcription to discovery and user-facing tools. We’ll examine transparency, user expectations, and balancing efficiency with archival complexity and nuance.

Since 2022, SHARE Kalamazoo has partnered with Western Michigan University Libraries to preserve, present, and expand their longstanding oral history archives documenting Black history in Southwest Michigan. Learn more about the partnership history, current initiatives featuring community voices/organizations, and their vision for cultivating a local community of practice.

The Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive (BNDA) is a digital repository documenting anti-Black killings in the mid-twentieth century U.S. South. This session explores the metadata frameworks and cataloging initiatives behind the BNDA's Version 2.0 Update and demonstrates how those workflows make 17,000+ records searchable, filterable, and accessible to researchers and the public.

As libraries build new digital repositories, digital preservation requirements can remain aspirational. At UM Library, we are working to integrate our local requirements into a new software development project. We will share project management techniques used, our alignment goals, and our reflections on progress so far.

In rural Nigerian communities, oral histories and folk knowledge have always been passed down through conversation. What happens when there is no one left to speak? This session explores how Global Students Nest built a community-owned digital repository to preserve cultural heritage in local languages, accessible offline, governed locally.

LibShack transforms historical records and archival collections into AI-powered docufilms and interactive exhibit experiences. This session screens The Mimeograph Room, an AI cinematic reenactment of the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott, and features a live interaction with an AI avatar representing a historical figure, bringing underrepresented histories into conversation with contemporary audiences.

Physical size is foundational to how cultural heritage materials were created, used, and understood. But this information is typically lost when an item is digitized. Autosizer is a custom computer vision pipeline, trained to identify and measure calibration targets, and thereby recover dimensional metadata latent in millions of digitized images.

CAWG recently decided to reform as a new working group – the Responsible Digital Representation Working Group (RDRWG). Learn more about our transition process and share your thoughts about the support you’d like to see the DLF community provide for practitioners seeking ethical best practices for digital repositories.

The Title II mandate in the United States, and stricter accessibility laws worldwide, has had repository managers scrambling. Learn from one institution's woes as they provide a blueprint to transform digital repository and institutional repository content for accessibility while navigating legal interpretations and remediating workflows.