2026 Conference Programs

How can archives transcend digital repositories to reach the communities they document? TAMI shares their strategy for "amplifying" Houston’s LGBTQ+ history through high-growth social media outreach, artistic collaborations, and physical presence at local events. Learn how we use zines, Pride festivals, and partnerships to make archival films accessible.

What would it mean to offer free, nearly unlimited scanning for patrons in special collections and archives? This lightning talk presents a service model that combines high-volume patron-driven scanning, responsive archival description, and strategic digitization. It expands access to collections while balancing labor and infrastructure through practical, scalable workflows.

While AI-assisted "vibe coding" offers rapid prototyping, digital collections require long-term sustainability and security. This lightning talk critiques the hidden technical debt of LLM-generated code, advocating for hand-coded, low-barrier frameworks like CollectionBuilder as a resilient, transparent, and ethically sound approach to maintaining the digital scholarship infrastructure of the future.

In Canada, the Copyright Act does not explicitly define the term “author,” which is open to interpretation in the age of generative AI. This talk explores the possibility of AI systems being recognized as legal persons and being granted rights and authorship for generated works, through a critical lens.

Nitrate negatives are a fire hazard and a challenge for long-term storage. To solve this challenge, the Beinecke Library created a workflow for identifying nitrates, deaccessioning them, digitizing them, and ingesting the images to Preservica for preservation and the Digital Library for public access, after which the nitrates are destroyed.

We will discuss the additional programmatic steps and coding used to assess collection review datasets. This will provide a window into the impact collection review might inadvertently have on the diversity of a collection, and how repository data points and scripts applied at scale may be used to mitigate this.

This lightning talk will focus on our experience using the Marriott Reparative Metadata Assessment Tool (MaRMAT) to supplement two years of name and subject record remediation we have already completed. The tool was useful in identifying potentially harmful language applied via subject headings and finding aid descriptive text.