DLF Forum Presentations
Here there be dragons: Seeking reparative metadata practices in self-deposit repositories
Authors: Woodbrook, Rachel, Rayburn, Alexandria
Year: 2025This session presents the results of a semester-long collaboration between an iSchool PhD student and librarians overseeing Deep Blue Documents, an institutional repository with over 170,000 items, seeking best practices in addressing potentially harmful metadata and content in existing deposits, and in the deposition of future content.
W06: Fostering Civic Engagement Through Digital Archives – The Revolutionary City Project
Authors: Miller, Bayard
Year: 2025Circa: A Customizable, Web-based Request System for Special Collections
Authors: Jonathan Page
Year: 2025Circa is a web-based system for managing requests for items in special collections, developed by NC State Libraries. It integrates with ArchivesSpace, supports various request types, and utilizes IIIF. A new customizable, open-source version is in development. This talk explores Circa’s capabilities and invites feedback on its community-driven evolution.
"We Thought It Was One Tape, One Record": Metadata Mayhem and Workflow Lessons from a Large-Scale A/V Digitization Project
Authors: Smith, Louise, Ehrbar, Katie
Year: 2025What do you do when your A/V collection has no metadata, AI transcriptions hallucinate wildly, and a single VHS tape contains nine discrete events? This presentation shares workflow strategies, lessons learned, and future recommendations from a year-long digitization and metadata effort on a donor’s personal A/V archive.
Metadata Augmentation Using AI: an IMLS Grant Project
Authors: Carlstone, Jamie, Young, Jennifer
Year: 2025Northwestern University Libraries is developing a generative AI/ML tool to create and/or augment item-level descriptions for digitized collection materials at scale thus allowing metadata librarians to provide deeper analysis and context. We will discuss testing and assessment of the tool as well as the ethical implications of the work.
Doing Less with Less: Rebuilding an ASpace to Islandora Metadata Pipeline
Authors: Paquette, Michelle
Year: 2025Post-Islandora 2 migration, Smith's ASpace-to-Islandora metadata pipeline broke and the people who built it were no longer at Smith. Michelle Paquette, Metadata Archivist, will explain how she rebuilt it, embracing her own more limited skillset.
Digital Heritage, Collective Impact: Navigating Digital Partnerships with Community Collaborators
Authors: Murphy, Grayson, Hebert, Kevin, Schiff, Kelly
Year: 2025This presentation will outline strategy related to the management of community-focused digitization projects. We will discuss the challenges, the rewards, and everything in between as we dive into two of our ongoing projects in collaboration with the Birmingham Music Archive and the Jefferson County District Attorney’s Office.
Modernizing Access: Project Management Insights from the UCSF Industry Documents Library (IDL) Website Redesign
Authors: Ignacio, Melissa
Year: 2025Modernizing Access: Project Management Insights from the UCSF Industry Documents Library Website Redesign
Melissa Ignacio
University of California San Francisco
This session explores project management strategies behind the UCSF Industry Documents Library website redesign. It highlights how a remote, cross-functional team collaborated to select methods and tools that ensured a successful and user-centered redesign that meets evolving research needs, implements accessibility, and incorporates updated UCSF branding standards.How Do I find This?: Design Justice and User Testing of a Library Website Without a Search Box
Authors: Tobiason, Anders
Year: 2025What happens when students encounter a library website with no obvious search box? This presentation discusses the initial results of UX Cafe style user testing of a library website without a search box and reflects on how this data can help build a website grounded in Design Justice principles.
Borderlands Storytelling: Archival Collections, Digital Approaches, and Library Engagement in Innovative Humanities Scholarship
Authors: Varner, Alana, Senseney, Megan, Wells, Chelsea, Reyes-Escudero, Verónica
Year: 2025This presentation explores strategies for facilitating community-engaged digital scholarship. We will discuss findings from a funded, three-year project at a research intensive, Hispanic Serving, Land Grant Institution that utilized library-based seed grants to engage researchers in digital and data storytelling efforts on and about the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.
Values-driven AI in libraries and archives: Introducing the Viewfinder toolkit
Authors: Mannheimer, Sara, Clark, Jason A., W. H. Young, Scott, Shorish, Yasmeen, Scates Kettler, Hannah
Year: 2025AI hype is everywhere! Libraries and archives want to use AI to improve our resources and services, while protecting our communities from harm. We developed the Viewfinder toolkit to help practitioners implement AI in alignment with professional values. This hands-on session introduces the toolkit and guides participants through its use.
Reasoning with Small Language Models (SLM) to Create Trustworthy GenAI
Authors: Clark, Jason A.
Year: 2025A central problem with current interfaces for GenAI are the rapid modes of output production. These implementations are optimized for efficiency and concealing the ways output is created. I would suggest that there’s no malice here, but rather, an human-computer interaction (HCI) oversight that misses how to create systems we can trust and learn from. We trust what we can see and explain. With the rise of inference models and chain of thought coding techniques, there are new ways to slow down these systems and ask them to show their work processes to create content.
In this talk, I’ll walk through a working LLM agent prototype and emerging research using small language models (models that run on a phone or laptop), applied reasoning/inference methods, and an interface that works to explain the process it used to come up with an answer. In the end, we’ll come to understand how we can take advantage of the affordances of the dialogic interface and how we can start to build trust in these systems. I’ll also make the case for how experiments like this are essential components of GenAI Literacy and how you can bring these lessons into your own work to understand and teach GenAI.
Digital Preservation as a Dependency
Authors: Cirella, David, Manton, Jonathan
Year: 2025Yale Library is integrating digital access and preservation through a stewardship model that prioritizes sustainability, usability, and ethical practices. This presentation explores how access systems, workflows, and stakeholder needs are supported through policy, custom development, and infrastructure planning to ensure long-term discoverability and preservation of digital special collections.
The Care and Feeding of the Carpentries: Cultivating Inclusive Software Development Communities in Libraries
Authors: Wadland, Justin, Stubbs, Jennifer, Wheeler, Jonathan, Martin, Scott
Year: 2025This panel explores the efforts of libraries to organize and host Carpentries workshops that teach foundational coding and data science workshops through pedagogy grounded in inclusive values. Panelists will share tips on getting started with Carpentries, sustaining and growing existing programs, and participating in the larger Carpentries community.
Clearing a Path for a Virtual Reading Room Program
Authors: Fuchs, Sara, Fisher, Katherine, Memory, Lindsey
Year: 2025This panel explores how Emory and BYU are designing Virtual Reading Rooms (VRRs) to expand access to restricted digital materials. Presenters will discuss differing definitions and use cases for VRRs then share lessons from their own pilot projects—including cross-institutional collaboration, legal and technical challenges, and policy design—offering practical insights for building ethical, sustainable, and mission-driven VRR programs.
Planning What's Next for the DLF Climate Justice Working Group
Authors: Wadland, Justin, Spiro, Lisa
Year: 2025CLIR recently completed the Climate Resiliency Action Series, an IMLS-funded training program that grew out of a DLF Climate Justice Working Group (CJWG) proposal. At this working session, we will reflect on lessons learned from the workshop series and solicit input about what the CJWG should focus on next.
DataWorks: Creating a data catalog from the ground up
Authors: Khan, Huda, Frost, Hannah
Year: 2025Stanford University Libraries is developing the Dataworks data catalog which is a data discovery system for supporting research and teaching activities. This presentation will cover current and planned work for understanding user needs, developing an infrastructure for metadata retrieval, and designing and testing the DataWorks user interface.
Google slides are available at https://bit.ly/DLFDataworks . A related GitHub repository for the metadata harvesting pipeline is available at https://github.com/sul-dlss/dataworks-etl .
Sunset Planning: Lessons and Tools for Responsible Stewardship of Community Digital Infrastructure and Projects
Authors: Becker, Snowden, Kinnaman, Alex, Vowell, Zachary, Wiseman, Christine
Year: 2025Sharing lessons from the sunset of the twenty-year-old digital preservation network MetaArchive, this workshop provides tools to help community-based digital infrastructure and projects anticipate endings and pivotal changes as a part of holistic sustainability planning; express core values; and address diverse member needs as part of graceful change management.
See https://bit.ly/sunset-resources for supplemental materials at the workshop.
We Are the [Project] Champions: Collaborative Project Management in a Digital Imaging Lab
Authors: Kinnaman, Alex, Westblade, Julia
Year: 2025This presentation details the system of committees Virginia Tech University Libraries uses to evaluate digitization projects, consult with stakeholders, and oversee production. Involving a team ensures digital collections at VTUL are diverse, equitable, and accessible. The presentation will highlight workflows and strategies for project management of several large, concurrent projects.
See https://bit.ly/DLF-dig-project-resources for supplemental materials at the presentation.
Hire Learning: Reducing Accessibility Work Burnout with Methodical Student Employee Hiring v.2 with links
Authors: Birchmeier, Bryan
Year: 2025An overview of accessibility initiatives at the University of Michigan libraries which employ students with specific, complementary skills to address remediation of content, alleviate workload, and address accessibility gaps present at the libraries.
This version of the presentation contains links requested by audience members for reference. Those links are located in the notes field of the final slide.
What's in the Box? LIS Students Use a Digital Humanities Toolkit to Explore Interdisciplinary Research Potential within Undiscovered Collections
Authors: Hass, Madeline, Dziengel, Meghan, Belovich, Alex
Year: 2025Drawing on student-led work, this presentation introduces and demonstrates an accessible and freely available digital humanities toolkit that can be applied to a common problem within library collection management: a collection of materials that lacks rich metadata and appears to have a narrow range of potential users.
Inclusive description? In this political climate?
Authors: Beck, Emma, Wright, Challen
Year: 2025DAM'ed if You Do, DAM'ed if You Don't: Using Generative AI to Support a Digital Asset Manager Migration
Authors: Miessler, R.C.
Year: 2025Gettysburg College's Musselman Library undertook a migration from CONTENTdm to AM Quartex, but the library did not have coding or development support to leverage the CONTENTdm API. Instead, ChatGPT was used to develop Python scripts to automate certain aspects of the migration, generally successfully.
LDF Recollection: Establishing Digital Workflows for a Legal Civil Rights Archive
Authors: Wong, Shelby, Wingate, Ashton
Year: 2025Stitching Stories: Bringing Material Cultures Into the Digital Humanities
Authors: Ismail, Mariam
Year: 2025The 23/54 Project preserves the legacy of a 1947 education lawsuit in Appalachia, Virginia, through a community quilt. This presentation explores how 3D scanning and an interactive digital exhibit expand the quilt’s reach, integrating material culture into digital humanities while engaging descendant families, communities, and students in the process.
Agile Documentation Development for Digital Preservation Systems
Authors: Baginski, Alisha, Glover, Sarah, Griffin, Melanie, Jewell, Andrew
Year: 2025How can you efficiently and effectively create all of the documentation needed to support the sustainable implementation and use of your digital preservation systems and tools? Join this panel for a spirited discussion about how a team of digital preservation practitioners implemented a lightweight Agile approach to documentation development.
Nuclear Planning and Preparedness: Curating Documentary Production Collections on the Atomic West for the CU Digital Library
Authors: Velte, Ashlyn, Wagner, Jamie
Year: 2025CU Boulder Libraries’ archivists share their experiences selecting and preparing digital collections from original documentary production material about nuclear activity in the American west. They will present challenges in balancing the needs of activist stakeholders, approaches to legal and ethical considerations, and strategies for complex archival media production collections.
Experiences and Advice from the Institutional Perspective of a Consortium-Based Digital Collection Management System Migration
Authors: Miller, Evan
Year: 2025System migrations take time and energy; however, this is not always the reality for institutions, especially with consortium-supported systems. Sharing takeaways and practical examples from a digital collection management system migration, the presenter will discuss how an archives can assess its collections and remediate metadata efficiently and effectively under a prescribed timeline.Why keep data science local? Case Studies from Two Universities Building Scholarly Indices with Open Data to Improve Institutional Data Literacy
Authors: Teykl, Katharine, Hemingway, Jordan, Clark, Jason, Hutchens, Chad
Year: 2025Two mid-sized libraries created indices of institutional scholarship using open code and the OpenAlex dataset. This panel explores the implementation of these applications, examines the open data sources used, and offers a candid discussion on what is gained and lost when choosing to outsource data science research and development.
OpenAlex Python Toolkit for Librarians
Authors: Teykl, Katharine, Hutchens, Chad
Year: 2025This workshop will focus on using Python to retrieve institutionally affiliated bibliometric data (e.g. articles, datasets, books, etc.) from the OpenAlex API. Participants will be supplied with pre-written Python code that can be run from Google Colab to generate reports and data visualizations of research outputs from their organization.
Curating Digital Exhibits in Community Archives
Authors: Matusiak, Krystyna, Han, Ruohua
Year: 2025Digital exhibits, a digital genre built on the tradition of physical displays in museums and libraries, have been adopted in digital libraries, humanities projects, and community archives. Digital exhibits can provide new ways of promoting digitized collections and offer the potential to address archival silences and tell the stories of underrepresented groups. While the role and structure of digital exhibits have been explored in the context of academic institutions and public libraries, there is no research examining the methods of creating digital exhibits in local community archives. This presentation will discuss approaches to curating digital exhibits in community archives by using the Park County Local History Archives (PCLHA) as a case. PCLHA is a community archive located in a rural area of Colorado. Its Digital Archive features five digital exhibits about different aspects of local history, immigrant communities, and everyday life. The exhibits were built in collaboration with the University of Denver’s Library and Information Science program. This case illustrates the ways that digital exhibits can provide opportunities for acknowledging and addressing absences, extending coverage, and documenting almost forgotten stories. We will also present additional findings based on analyzing the content of selected exhibits and interviewing people involved in creating them. These findings explore approaches to selecting topics, methods used for constructing narratives, and strategies for presenting social justice topics. The presentation aims to enhance the understanding of the process of creating digital exhibits in local community archives, especially in terms of how to uplift the histories of marginalized communities.
The Metadata Lifecycle: From Creation to Preservation
Authors: Caleb Simone, Patricia Glowinski, Kelli O'Toole
Year: 2025This panel explores the lifecycle of metadata in digital collections, focusing on how the utility of metadata evolves from creation to preservation. We examine metadata's transformations through the perspectives of collections management, digital access, and digital preservation. We use examples from completed, in-progress, and planned collections, addressing successes and challenges.From Archives to Access: AI-Powered Transcription for Multimedia Collections
Authors: Butler, Matthew
Year: 2025This presentation introduces a validated AI pipeline for generating transcripts and summaries of historic political ads. Developed collaboratively and described in a recent peer-reviewed study co-authored by the presenter, the project demonstrates tools for evaluating and enabling access to video collections, offering librarians, archivists and developers practical methods to enhance discoverability and reuse.
Digitizing NYC Mayor David Dinkins Photographs
Authors: Sarah Cuk
Year: 2025I describe digitizing photographic negatives from the Mayor David Dinkins administration (1990-1993) at the NYC Municipal Archives. Unlike typical workflows where records are digitized once processed, I’m simultaneously processing, digitizing, and describing. This maintains consistency so that everything is standardized and ready for members of Dinkins’ Administration to transcribe.
Evolving Roles and Tools: Navigating the Future of Project Management in Digital Libraries
Authors: Lovins, Cari
Year: 2025As digital library work grows in complexity, so must our approaches to managing it. This workshop will explore the evolving landscape of project management in the digital library space, including incorporating AI tools, adapting to economic constraints, and transitioning from traditional project management to broader program and service management roles.
Mixed-Methods Approaches for Reformatting Projects at Scale: a Case Study
Authors: Gottlieb-Miller, Lauren, Smith, Marian, Stakes, Austin
Year: 2025This presentation explores the digitization of The Daily Cougar, UH’s student newspaper in publication since 1928. Using a mixed-methods approach involving microfilm digitization, in-house digitization, and born-digital preservation, we discuss project management, stakeholder collaboration, and lessons for large-scale complex digitization initiatives.
The Data Den: Creating Space for Data, Discovery, and Community
Authors: Hight, Alexa
Year: 2025After two successful datathons, we recognized the need for a dedicated, inclusive space for data work. The Data Den was born: transforming a traditional library instruction lab into a collaborative hub for students from all disciplines.