2026 Conference Programs

"Dangerous Harbor: Finding Unfree Laborers in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake," brings together expertise across several institutions to create a dataset detailing escape attempts of indentured servants and enslaved people across Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina. Comprised of faculty and students, this panel explores facets of this project’s history and design.

The Department of Digital Stewardship at Syracuse University Libraries developed a computational methodology based in character error rate (CER) analysis to evaluate tabular handwritten text transcriptions produced by generative AI tools. These tools were tested on historical cemetery registers to explore opportunities for rapid, scalable transcription workflows.

This presentation features audiovisual materials from the Larry Long Papers, part of a CLIR “Digitizing Hidden Collections” grant. We discuss flexible archival workflows, iterative metadata creation, inventory and digitization logistics, and the role of evolving contextual information, while also addressing donor collaboration, community narratives, and future community archiving initiatives.

How can archivists and community partners collaborate to amplify meaningful stories from overwhelming unprocessed digital collections? This session offers a path forward: one where storytelling, community collaboration, and iterative practice transform archival processing into an ongoing and engaging process of discovery.

The University of Victoria Libraries is home to the Transgender Archives, the world’s largest physical collection of Trans+ histories. Through exploring recent digitization efforts within this collection, this presentation will discuss the challenges presented and interventions broadly available to cultural heritage professionals when navigating ethically charged digital objects and descriptions.

The DLF Climate Justice Working Group seeks feedback on a work-in-progress “field guide” for the digital library community to the climate implications of hyperscale data centers to advance artificial intelligence. We will share what we’ve learned and discuss with participants how these impacts are showing up in our work.

Melting Metropolis is an international project focusing on histories of urban heat and health. Members of the New York City cohort will share how they have interpreted the urban heat island effect in creative projects, guided by stories that are under-represented in broader narratives about extreme weather and climate change.

Students used the Clinton Wright Photograph Collection and Las Vegas Voice newspapers to create metadata and link data enhancements in a database. This presentation highlights archival research workflows, entity identification, and community discovery while demonstrating how student-driven metadata projects can support African American history, linked data initiatives, and student engagement.

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.

Most institutions run aging repositories with no budget to replatform and thin support for accessibility or AI. We are building platform-agnostic tools that add modern capabilities for derivatives, metadata, and accessibility to the repository you already run, while keeping humans in the loop. No migration required.

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.

Many institutions are embracing AI to support digital accessibility requirements, but still have concerns about ethical and environmental ramifications of AI. Participants from three institutions share how they are addressing accessibility with AI workflows, tools, as well as related considerations. Their insights include the pros and cons of this work.

Many institutions rely on familiar narratives due to limited access to diverse content. This session introduces a curated, video-first storytelling model that expands institutional capacity for exhibits, education, and outreach. Attendees will explore how structured digital access to underrepresented stories can support more dynamic, inclusive storytelling across programs and audiences.

This presentation explores the expanding yet hidden archival labor of managing digital infrastructure, focusing on how archivists are responsible for ensuring interoperability between independent systems. We explore the tension between the invisibility of digital labor within a historically women’s profession and the profitability of tech-centered work in male dominated fields.

When digital collections and scholarly work live in separate repository systems, libraries pay in duplicated work and fractured discovery. Hear how three institutions migrated both onto a single hosted platform, and what changed for workflows, discoverability, and accessibility, and what they’d tell libraries considering the same move.

Convened by the DLF UX AIG Working Group, this panel delivers actionable frameworks for UX practitioners navigating growing complexity in digital libraries. Attendees gain strategies for designing phygital experiences, evaluating AI ethics, and replacing canned metrics with digital object–level insights to inform design, assessment, decision making, and practice.

Providing access to digitized collections material is time-intensive work that can very easily exceed staffing capacity. In this panel, archivists, librarians, and digital collections managers examine the challenges and opportunities involved in expanding access to digitized materials while sharing strategies for keeping digital collections backlogs at bay.

This panel explores three distinct models of web archiving that prioritize the expertise and agency of creators and communities. Presenters from Internet Archive, Getty Research Institute, Poynter Institute, IRE, and Archiving the Black Web will demonstrate how diverse stakeholders can partner with memory institutions to define their own digital histories.

This presentation explores digital archival exhibits as sites for primary source literacy education. We discuss a novice-expert collaboration of building a digital exhibit on Chinese and Chinese American students at the University of Denver in the 1920s. We share adaptable techniques for extracting and embedding teaching points into instruction-oriented exhibits.