2024 Conference Programs

This Working Session will overview ongoing work for the IMLS-funded Data Speculations project to develop a legal and technical framework for librarians stewarding copyrighted data of cultural heritage. The audience will be encouraged to share their perspectives on challenges and opportunities for institutions developing copyrighted collections as data projects.

This panel discusses the challenges in translating tactile items into representative and authentic digital formats. Panelists discuss the digitization of three collections – Ricker Materials, Historic Games, and Gwendolyn Brooks – with the goal of expanding access to non-circulating collections and increasing diverse representation on UIUC Library’s digital platforms.

In libraries, user-centered design is often employed in website UX/UI and user access. In this presentation, three members of UAB’s Digitization and Digital Preservation department will discuss how they employ user-centered design in crafting internal workflows and systems, paying particular attention to an often-overlooked user who they call Future Us.

In this hands-on session, we will walk through how to solve common library tech issues using the free Toward Gigabit Libraries toolkit. The toolkit helps library staff scale up their tech skills to understand, improve, and fund IT and broadband improvements.

UAB libraries incorporated interactive technologies, including 3D scanning/printing, video/audio elements, and book displaying software into exhibitions to enhance public interaction, engagement, and accessibility. We created touchable representations of fragile artifacts, and supplemental objects. This presentation details the testing, implementation, and response to 3D printed objects, and highlights additional interactive technologies.

Leaders of open infrastructure services for research and scholarship discuss how they navigate organizational transitions and explore what “success”, “sustainability”, and “resilience” look like today for open infrastructures.

This presentation will provide coping tips and potential pitfalls for managing day-to-day work and projects, as well as soliciting audience coping skills, and ways neurotypical colleagues can help facilitate an inclusive workspace for their neurodivergent colleagues.

The growth and change of Private LOCKSS Networks (PLNs) over time has made it difficult to effectively understand the entire PLN ecosystem. Through visualizations and network mapping of PLN data, this presentation illuminates shifts in community-based digital preservation, and provides new ways for institutions to identify networks matching their needs.

Do you have a large collection of uncataloged microfilm? At the California Institute of Technology Library, a large collection of historical seismograms on film had been hidden and undiscoverable. Instead of cataloging and barcoding each item, you will see how we added the content using ArchivesSpace bulk importer tool.

Created a categorized style guide for captioning Spanish or English videos into accurate and accessible captions prepared for the New York University Digital Library and the Hemispheric Institute as there are only automated captions available. The project outlined collection assessment criteria, clear and succinct captioning style guidelines, and instructive workflows.

Who gets to shape institutional memory? This lightning talk discusses the digitization of over a half-century of recorded performances of Black Creative Music at Dartmouth. The project disrupts music genre boundaries in Dartmouth’s institutional history and interrogates their racialization and legacies in the academic and performative music cultures on campus.

How can research institutions make the most of locally digitized collections? This lightning talk will explore how targeted digitization reports aimed at liaison librarians can improve the discoverability and use of digitized collections among librarians, faculty, and students.

An Agile team needs more than a white board to show work progress and share ideas. The primary purpose of the documentation for agile development is to create acceptable documentation to stakeholders and for the team time. An Agile team should document continuously and all the documentation should be collaborative.

This lightning talk will highlight the recently published “Digital Library Accessibility Policy and Practice Guidelines: A Guide by the Digital Library Federation’s Digital Accessibility Working Group.” The guidelines aim to help libraries, archives, and museums work to adopt accessibility best practices in their digital libraries by implementing an accessibility policy.

Indiana University archives and special collections are undergoing a massive metadata clean-up after migrating over 3,000 finding aids and 6,500 accession records into ArchivesSpace. The majority of this lightning talk will focus on how we are sharing the responsibility of remediating inaccurate, duplicate, and/or harmful metadata.

The ethical dimensions of AI and how they relate to creating, acquiring, and disseminating information. The profound role that AI plays in exploring increasing opportunities, and potential biases for positive transformative change

Panelists will discuss a collaborative inter-institutional project to preserve and make accessible digital artwork projects that are in danger of becoming inaccessible due to software and platform rot. The panel will offer perspectives on cross-institutional digital stewardship, rights management, artist contracts, and developing best practices for reauthoring.

This session highlights a new National Endowment for the Humanities funding initiative that “seeks to understand and address the ethical, legal, and societal implications of AI." Emphasizing GLAM community priorities, we will share examples of successful awards, offer suggestions for applying, and invite audience questions and feedback.

The DLF Climate Justice Working Group will introduce their work on the IMLS-funded, CLIR’s Climate Resiliency Workshop Series. This presentation will introduce the interactive workshop series ongoing throughout the 2024-2025 academic year, as well as opportunities to engage in virtual climate circles and in-person events geared at generating practical actions.

The American Congress Digital Archives Portal project aims to provide a single point of access to underutilized congressional archives from multiple institutions. Metadata harvesting workflows differ depending on participants’ choice of DAMS, however, presenting challenges for future scaling. In this working session, project partners will demonstrate workflows and solicit feedback.

The presenters will share their perspectives collaborating together on digital archiving and preservation workshops that took place in Saipan and Guam in April 2024. Beyond these reflections, they will share their future plans for centering Chamorro and Carolinian Indigenous agency and archival knowledge through facilitating opportunities in the Mariana Islands.

The 2023 NDSA digital storage infrastructure survey results will be shared to provide insights on trends, technologies, and standards that impact digital preservation and services. The survey co-chairs will also analyze changes from previous surveys conducted in 2011, 2013, and 2019, providing a longitudinal assessment of practices.

Discover practical insights from the University of Michigan Library’s UX research on digital collections for text, images, and audio/moving images. We’ll share stories from users we interviewed and strategies to improve user engagement and accessibility, highlighting our collaboration with colleagues to enhance novice and expert interactions with digital collections.

“Research and Development in the Open Lab” is a new undergraduate internship at the University of Pittsburgh, where interns explore the intersection of makerspace technologies and digital research methods (e.g. data management for 3D models, AR for network visualization). Presenters highlight the structure and outcomes of this collaborative internship pilot.

Interested in learning about the difference in infrastructure and workflows between using a vendor based system vs an open source setup? As someone who went from working in a vendor based system environment to an institution that not just adopts but champions open source systems, here are some anecdotal insights.

This presentation will make a strong argument for sound quality as an accessibility issue in GLAM organizations, then show easy and affordable steps to fix and stay on top of sound quality so that everyone who uses these technologies can have their voice be heard without unintended harmful side effects.

As facilitators and champions of open practices, academic libraries are key players in the Open Science movement. Analyzing over 3,000 papers, we chart the contributions of US academic libraries to open initiatives. By examining US-specific challenges and opportunities, we identify best practices and areas of opportunity.

I'll present several linguistics analyses (ngrams, hyponamy trees, a simple corpora) that visually render the unruly semantic relatedness of digital library terminology. This will show the differences and overlap between terms and their use over time. I conclude with how I think we as a subfield should coalesce our terms.

Keeping up with web archiving maintenance can be challenging, so we created Webjam, a virtual co-working space, where we meet quarterly to run crawls and problem-solve. Our talk will introduce this space, share how it has benefitted us, and invite others to join.

This presentation reviews a research project in progress on digital collection development policies. The focus will be on an analysis of 50+ policies and a subset of data related to the use of diversity, equity, access, and inclusion as selection criteria alongside other, sometimes clashing, values and priorities.

Public access is central to the missions of both the NEH and IMLS, and our agencies are working together to define policies that guide equitable sharing of federally funded grant outcomes. Our lightning talk will share key requirements, plans for implementation, and resources for more information.

This session introduces the theory and practice of low-tech digital pedagogy. Instructors will share successful examples of digital methods workshops taught without an over-reliance on tools then guide participants through exercises to redesign their own instruction to feature more time for critical thinking and less time for interfaces.

Hyku, built on Samvera's Hyrax, simplifies institutional repository management for teams with a limited technical staff. This session provides hands-on experience with Hyku's latest features, allowing participants to explore its updated functionality.

This workshop introduces the DLF Cultural Assessment Working Group’s Inclusive Metadata Toolkit, a new resource for practitioners interested in incorporating culturally sensitive, reparative, and inclusive practices in their metadata assessment and maintenance. We will review the toolkit’s framework and resources, including a walk-through of how to use suggested tools.

This hands-on, interactive workshop introduces participants to Booksnake, a new mobile app that makes it feel like digitized archival items are physically present in a user's real-world surroundings via the augmented reality technology in iPhones and iPads. Booksnake makes embodied interaction more accessible to more people, advancing equity and inclusion.

Relational Possibilities is a data science project exploring community relations and futurist realities of Indigeneity and Blackness through art in Philadelphia. This is an interactive panel where attendees participate in imagining a future beyond the settler state by playing video games, exploring museums, and donating to the digital community archive.

For the 10 year anniversary of the Assessment Interest Group (AIG), this panel will provide a retrospective of the overall work of the AIG and also take a closer look at the work of three of the current AIG working groups – Cost, User Experience and Content Reuse.

“Amplifying Black Voices in Iowa” is a cross-institutional digitization grant project. Presentation topics will include project overview, the online portal, challenges faced, and a look at the Black Churches of Central Iowa case study and how it will be integrated to help amplify the stories the project’s digital collections tell.

This presentation will reflect on our recent experience of implementing a Survey123 workshop for Native American students during a summer bridge program held on a large research university campus. We hope to bridge the gap between technical and cultural outcomes, exploring a novel way of “seeing oneself” on campus.

We will detail findings from a 3-month project using LLMs’ (Large Language Models) to generate web-compliant alternative text (alt text) descriptions for born-digital and digitized still images. The presentation will highlight the platforms tested, building a chat assistant, workflows, successes, and failures.

This presentation describes a UX-led approach to the development of a new digital library platform at the University of York and reflects on the power of user-centered design to result in digital spaces that are more representative of and responsive to our users’ needs.

King Library’s Public Digital Humanities Center aims to nurture connections between community groups and citizens grounded in the City of San José and innovative and critical researchers and students at San José State University. Explore the planning and community input processes that shaped the development of this collaborative project.

This session invites digital library and technology practitioners interested in building capacity for adopting and maintaining open-source technologies to support the mission and goals of cultural heritage institutions. Conveners will share theoretical approaches and questions to frame conversations. We will also discuss the possibility of developing a community of practice.

Join this panel discussion about the experiences of digital libraries and archives during on-campus demonstrations in 2024 related to the larger conflict in Israel and Palestine. Panelists will reflect on their decision-making processes during these events, the mechanics of collecting amid institutional conflict, and the challenge of documenting competing viewpoints.

How do we create community digital archives? How can we assist community groups and institutions in maintaining their own archives, particularly when they lack access to digitization equipment? This presentation describes the process for developing and sustaining a digitization infrastructure for community outreach for cultural preservation within the Black community in Baltimore.

Vassar College Libraries addressed the issue of user experience while accessing data that may contain racist, xenophobic, or otherwise harmful material in the Digital Library. This session will share how the Libraries decisions were informed through collaborative discussion across campus groups and implemented by the Libraries DS&T Department.