TCDL 2025

TCDL will provide breakfast.

The Check-in and information table is open all day.

In September 2024 the Baylor University Libraries hosted the Texas Digital Humanities Symposium, a 2-day event showcasing the DH tools, resources, and research from across the state. This presentation examines the inception, planning, and management behind this symposium and considers its potential to foster an ongoing regional DH community if it is developed into an annual event.

The original vision for the symposium was born out of a collaboration between the Baylor Libraries' Data & Digital Scholarship program and Library Collections. Data & Digital Scholarship contributed experience with digital humanities engagement and programming while Library Collections looked to leverage vendor relationships to enhance the event.

Symposium organizers sought to strengthen engagement and DH connections across Texas through free registration,catered meals funded by sponsors, and lodging support for non-Baylor presenters. With 77 attendees covering 14 institutions and 3 vendors, the symposium featured a keynote on AI and humanities methodology, 16 peer presentations, a hands-on workshop, and a discussion on AI’s role in DH, with results documented on a publicly accessible Padlet.

Initial feedback suggests that the event successfully laid the groundwork for ongoing collaboration. Post-symposium survey results indicated that attendees highly valued networking opportunities. Additionally, they expressed interest in future discussions on cross-campus partnerships, community-engaged DH, grant strategies, and student-centered
research. Looking ahead, the symposium planning team is exploring an alternating in-person and virtual model to expand accessibility and sustain engagement.

This presentation will share key outcomes from the 2024 symposium, including attendee demographics, feedback, and strategies for strengthening a regional DH network through accessible, community-driven programming.

As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes more integrated into libraries, questions arise about how to transition AI-driven research and development projects into reliable, production-ready tools for both internal and external users. This panel will explore these challenges through two case studies, offering insights and practical next steps for those navigating the shift from research to implementation.

The Oklahoma State University Archives continue to implement facing recognition models for photograph retrieval. Combining AI technologies and annotation tools has significantly improved the discoverability of digital archival materials. Looking ahead, this work will help integrate several of the digital archival functions within a comprehensive workflow.

For several years, The University of North Texas Libraries and the Portal to Texas History have worked with a variety of tools to provide time-based captions for audio-video materials in our Digital Collections. This work started with several rounds of research funding and has now transitioned into standardized workflows for all AV material being added to the system.

This moderated panel will provide brief overviews of both projects, their histories, their progressions from research and development projects into production ready infrastructures in use at their institutions. Following the overview presentations, the moderator will present a series of general questions for each participant to answer with the goal of providing advice and lessons learned for the audience.

As a first-time attendee, you'll have the chance to engage with fellow librarians, archivists, and library professionals, sharing best practices and exploring innovative solutions in our field. This event is designed to foster collaboration and professional growth, ensuring you leave with valuable insights and new connections. Experienced attendees are encouraged to attend this session.

TCDL will provide beverage service.

Come get your headshots taken by photographer Parker Lunsford. Those interested can sign-up in the linked Time Slot Signup Form. A max of 5-7 people can sign up for every 15-minute slot. Walk-ups will be allowed if there are available time slots. Photos will be taken in front of a grey backdrop.

Adolpho Leirner Collection integration: connecting collections across institutional silos.
By: Sarah Long

In 2007 the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston began the process of acquiring the collection of Sao Paulo based art collector Adolpho Leirner. This collection consists of painting, sculpture, drawings, posters, and graphic materials. In 2016 Adolpho Leirner gifted his personal library and archives to the museum to support scholarship about the collection. The goal of the Adolpho Leirner Collection integration project is to create a freely accessible online portal for the complete collection in order to connect the scholarship, archives, and objects to each other and make those connections discoverable. The feat is to link and interconnect information from various institutional silos. By figuring out who this resource is for, what the research value is, and how much time and effort should be invested, we can develop a scope and limitations for the depth of interconnectivity. Working closely with collection managers we created a landing page featuring the details of the collection and linking to appropriate materials. Within each collection we enhanced the metadata in the object, library, and archival records. The next step of the project currently in progress is creating a more interactive aggregate collection hosted in the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Library’s CONTENTdm.


Collaborating Across Borders: Preserving the Legacy of Sofia Ímber
By: Rita Johnston

At the University of Miami Libraries, we have been working to preserve, describe, and make accessible materials in the private home of Sofia Ímber (1924-2017). Ímber was an influential Venezuelan journalist, cultural critic, and the founder of the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (Museum of Modern Art) in Caracas, Venezuela and its director for 30 years. Most of the materials are in Venezuela, are not accessible to the public, and are at risk due to poor environmental conditions and political instability. With limited funding, we hired a project manager in the US and two archivists in Venezuela in 2022, who worked for several years to digitize and describe some materials, send the digital images to Miami, and ship a limited number of physical materials as well. Through Ímber’s daughter, Adriana Meneses, the Libraries acquired rare art catalogs from the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, digitized them, and secured the rights to publish them online. The Libraries created an exhibit, a digital exhibit, and hosted a reception to engage with the community, and continue to partner with Meneses and university development to try to raise external funds for additional efforts to preserve these materials.

We are currently applying for planning grant funding to create a survey of all materials in Ímber’s home to help in future efforts to preserve and digitize more materials, including audiovisual recordings of Ímber’s television programs. This presentation will appeal to those with an interest in managing international archives projects with a digital component.

Wondering how to get involved with the GIS interest group? Please stop by and check out the fun we have with mapping and geographic information systems (GIS), then stay for the camaraderie. Hosted by the Texas Digital Library GIS Interest Group, this Birds of a Feather session is an opportunity to share and learn about geospatial software, data, maps, and the role of libraries in providing infrastructure, access, and support. This will be a great chance for attendees to engage in conversation regarding a number of different GIS related topics that are of relevance to the library community including development of geospatial research support services, sharing of geospatial data from library collections, and organization of GIS training opportunities.

Storing, Organizing, and Sharing: Building Metadata Infrastructure for Open Educational Materials
By: Henna Punjabi

Texas State University libraries has continued to create and support the development of open educational materials for use within their community. These learning objects, however, are not easily discoverable or stored in a centralized location. This makes content sharing and measuring impact difficult. The institutional repository at Texas State utilizes DSpace and is hosted by TDL. Using the already established institutional repository, we created a new community of collections to store, organize, and make open materials discoverable. This open education collection would be built from scratch in many aspects, as DSpace’s flexibility allows for individual collections to operate differently as suits their needs. However, this flexibility can easily allow for a lack of structure, consistency, and quality in metadata across a collection. Guidelines and standardization are primarily dependent on external people to implement, rather than technological boundaries. To ensure quality metadata, I led the research, creation, and implementation of extensive standards and guidelines, created intentional collections to organize current and future items, and established infrastructure within the open education repository. This presentation highlights the necessity for external guidelines in digital repositories and explores the benefits of additional metadata fields for learning object repositories.

Restructuring the IR: Who, What, When, Why, How?
By: Xiao Zeng, Susan Hoover, & Taylor Davis-Van Atta

In recent years, the University of Houston Institutional Repository (UHIR) accumulated thousands of new items but, due to pandemic-time shifts in staffing, lacked coordinated administrative oversight. After joining UH Libraries as the Open Publishing Librarian in October 2024, I assumed responsibility for the repository and prioritized an assessment of the UHIR, its documentation, content, and relationship with both library and campus partners. In collaboration with colleagues in our metadata unit and preservation department, I holistically reviewed and revised the repository’s administrative and user documentation to consolidate resources and provide essential guidance for internal processes and campus communities. This step established shared understandings that serve as a foundation for long-term sustainability. Next, we conducted a data-driven evaluation to analyze the IR’s content discoverability and navigation. By examining peer repositories within the Texas Digital Library (TDL), we gained insights into scalability, transparency, and service quality that might inform our repository management practices. With support from our metadata team, we initiated a process of restructuring roughly 17,000 items across the UHIR while preserving item URLs for citation integrity. This presentation will discuss these processes and collaborations before discussing our approach to refining batch ingest workflows and the implementation of a SharePoint-based project management framework for streamlining incoming collections from anywhere on campus. By further studying management practices of peer repositories, we aim to accelerate UHIR’s growth, improve user services, and reshaping the UHIR into a sustainable campus resource.

TCDL will provide beverage service.

Unveiling a Difficult Past: An Analysis of Content Statements and Warnings in Repositories
By: Noah Garcia

It is an increasingly frequent occurrence to encounter “content warnings” and “trigger warnings” throughout one’s use of the internet. Commonly seen on social media websites, these pop-ups obscure content deemed graphic or explicit until the user opts into viewing it. A similar — yet separate method of handling potentially sensitive content — can be found as harmful content statements. These more generalized, less item specific statements can have a different impact on patron experience. As information continually gets created and subsequently archived, violent and disturbing content must be interacted with carefully. Archives preserve pieces of history and culture - the good, the bad, and the ugly. The continued question is - how should libraries, archives, and museums handle this nuanced and potentially harmful content? This presentation will share the importance of harmful content statements by providing examples, commonalities in language, and by arguing that harmful content statements (not warnings) are crucial to navigating libraries and archives. Lastly, it will encourage the re-evaluation of current potential harmful content statements in archival collections and the assurance of inclusive description and labeling.

Working with Harmful Content: A Practical Set of Tools for Managing Vicarious Trauma
By: Kat Strickland & Devon Murphy

Working with harmful language and content can affect us. Over the course of seeing or handling harmful materials, we can experience "vicarious trauma," also known as "secondary trauma," a state of distress that can be just as serious as primary traumatic experiences. As the University of Texas at Austin Libraries collections have a large amount of disturbing or sensitive material, guidance was sorely needed on how to balance metadata creation for these materials and the mental well-being of staff and student workers. Prompted by a series of historic maps containing place names with racial slurs, the presenters sought to create resources to better care for and respect the needs of metadata workers. This presentation will review the resulting guide and tools contained within, including a consent checklist, an anonymized check-in form, and example scenarios. The audience for this guide includes staff, student workers, and anyone who may be in frequent contact with harmful materials. By including discussion of both the guide’s conceptualization as well as how to use the tools, the presenters aim to demonstrate the content as a replicable model for other institutions.

Advancing Research Data Management through Enhanced Vertical Interoperability
By: Rob Day

Recently, interoperability has taken the forefront of discussions on research data management. For research tools, the focus has been on horizontal interoperability: improving the flows between tools that serve the same category, e.g. Generalist Repository Ecosystem Initiative’s (GREI) work in standardising generalist repository metadata.

However, data and metadata is also going to flow vertically, across tools used in different stages of the research process, until they finally reach the institutional repository and indeed thereafter.. How can we ensure that preservation and archiving work is enabled by the tools used in the research life cycle, rather than having to battle with fragmented information and metadata loss? How can institutions facilitate researcher workflows and uphold FAIR principles through interoperability between their research tools?

We present an end-to-end, integrated research data management workflow for physical samples, which integrates three tools, covering sample collection (Fieldmark), management and processing and archiving/sharing and storage (Dataverse). We also cover how the use of a material sample PID in every tool at every stage of the process acts as an integrating force and enhances data discovery. By utilising a concrete implementation of a research workflow that includes an institutional repository, we will illustrate the possibilities and pain points of integrating vertically.

We wish to present both practical recommendations as well as higher-level reflections on how to approach thinking and developing vertical interoperability at an institution, and its benefits for preservation, open access and RDM as a whole.


Navigating ADA Title II: Enhancing Web Accessibility in Library Publishing
By: Alexa Hight, Mark Baggett, Susan Hoover, Michelle McCrary & Kristi Park

This presentation will provide an overview of the updated Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) Title II rule and its implications for library publishing, as well as report on work of a Texas Digital Library (TDL) working group charged with developing resources for journal managers and editorial teams using the TDL’s Open Access Journal Hosting Service. It will consider the fundamental necessity of web accessibility to Open Access publishing, as well as demonstrate the power of collaboration to support meaningful improvement for users with disabilities.

In April 2024, the U.S. Attorney General signed a final rule addressing the accessibility of digital experiences under Title II of the ADA. The new rule requires state and local governments to ensure that web interfaces and content comply with WCAG 2.1 Level AA guidelines. For most public higher education institutions, the deadline for compliance is April 2026.

The updated rule has implications both for platforms that libraries use to host Open Access journals -- like the Open Journal Systems (OJS) platform used by TDL -- but also the content produced and published on those sites.

In response, the TDL OJS Users Group convened a working group in January 2025 to address compliance of the 90+ Open Access journal sites hosted by TDL. Choosing to focus its efforts on the content published on these sites (e.g. articles, images, and recordings), it charged the group with creating and disseminating a web accessibility toolkit for managers and editors of TDL-hosted journals.

As adoption of Fedora 6.x continues to grow, the Fedora program has been working diligently to unite the community by bringing together users to share updates, discuss challenges, and collaborate on future projects. This Birds-of-a-Feather session offers an opportunity for Fedora users of all levels to connect, exchange insights, and explore best practices across all versions of Fedora.

We’ll start with a brief community update, highlighting recent technology developments, roadmap milestones, and new engagement efforts. From there, we’ll open the floor for attendees to share institutional experiences, success stories, and lessons learned. Whether you're a longtime Fedora user, just getting started, or exploring how Fedora fits into your digital repository infrastructure, this session provides a welcoming space to learn from peers and help shape Fedora’s future.

Join members of the TDL OER Users Group (OUG) for this open meeting to learn more about the OUG and its work, discuss an upcoming project to build out an OER resource library, and engage in lively conversation about your OER challenges and successes.

Please feel free to bring your lunch! The session will start at 12:45.

TDL's OUG encourages the widespread use of open educational resources (OER) across Texas institutions by creating opportunities for open education advocates and practitioners to come together to exchange information and create resources for TDL members and the broader OER community.

TCDL will provide lunch. If you noted any specific dietary needs when registering for the conference, there is a meal waiting for you; talk to catering staff and they can assist you.

Designated quiet room during the lunch hour. Art supplies with be provided. Food is allowed in the classroom.

Please be considerate of fellow attendees present in the quiet space and keep noise to a minimum. If you have any concerns, please visit the Check-in table.

Need a break from presentations? Want to show off your crafting skills? This is the session for you. This session will focus on making connections through arts and crafts. No matter if you knit, crochet, draw, or color we want you to meet up with your fellow craft lovers during this one hour session. Give yourself a break from the technical library presentations and put on your creative crafting hat to show off those skills.

Iterating on Internships: Seeing How Far the Texas Tech Library's Digital Scholarship Internship Has Come Since 2022
By: Matthew McEniry & Megan Scott

In 2022, the Digital Scholarship Lab (DSL) at Texas Tech University Libraries was given the opportunity to create an internship position. Since then, we have had five interns participate in the Digital Scholarship Internship program. The objective of this program is to pull away the curtain of digital scholarship and teach its principles to students interested in careers in the fields of the humanities and/or Galleries, Libraries, Archives, & Museums (GLAMs). The goal is to guide interns in taking an unprocessed archival collection through all the steps to develop it into a digital collection that is fully described and available in our DSpace repository. This includes being exposed to project management processes, copyright curation, equipment and process training, digitization workflows, digital content management Systems (CMS) like DSpace, and metadata creation. The presentation will highlight the challenges faced and lessons learned over the past 3 years. This includes developing a new program, creating an application process, the designing of different iterations and improvements applied to each cohort, constructing a framework for teaching about digital scholarship, and honing professional skills. Finally, we will look at objectives for future cohorts.

What a News-ance!: Developing Training Methods for Issue-Level, Newspaper Metadata
By: Hannah Gale Lindsey & Brooke Edsall

The Texas Digital Newspaper Program (TDNP) digitizes newspapers from across Texas for open access and digital preservation on The Portal to Texas History. Newspapers, though viewed as consistent records of information, are businesses that pass through multiple hands as they publish over time. Because of this, item level newspaper metadata standards must adapt to allow for a consistent standard while also presenting items accurately. With these serial publications, the Digital Newspaper Unit (DNU) at UNT Libraries cannot reliably predict all potential problems that may occur when creating item level metadata for newspapers. This inconsistency of newspapers pose unique challenges for teaching student assistants to create issue-level metadata. To address this, the DNU has created training tools and exercises intended to simultaneously teach metadata standards and critical-thinking and problem-solving skills to support students in adapting to unpredictable metadata needs. By further developing its training methods, the DNU has developed strategies and tools for assessing and supporting student success with these skills, through a student-centered, holistic approach to training. As a result, students are not only better employees, but they are also better prepared for future careers. This presentation will present the process of developing and implementing these tools, how the DNU measures the tools’ levels of success, and the unit's plans for further development of training materials.

Since its launch in 2017, the Texas Data Repository (TDR), which is built on the Dataverse software platform and hosted by the Texas Digital Library (TDL), has served as a data repository for higher education institutions in Texas. Under the leadership of a Steering Committee which includes liaisons from each of the member institutions, TDR has evolved from simply filling a need identified by TDL membership to a leader in consortial repository management. This panel of TDR Steering Committee members will first introduce TDR and the historical context of its development. They will go on to discuss how TDR has evolved over the years and the ways in which it has been a leader among the data repository community in the areas of governance, policy, software development, training, and documentation. The panel presentation will also highlight recent work on creating and updating TDR training and guidance materials, such as the user manual, tutorial videos, and documentation on preferred file formats for depositing into the repository. We will also look forward to the future and discuss current work that is being undertaken by the TDR Steering Committee in the areas of assessment, interoperability with external services and repositories, support for large datasets, and data retention policy development in order to overcome challenges we expect to face in the years ahead as we approach TDR's 10th anniversary.

TCDL will provide snacks and beverage service.

Discussion and audience participation-centered demonstrations will revolve around strategies that the TDL GIS Interest Group have employed to cultivate a virtual community through the Covid pandemic and into the post-pandemic landscape. Our strategy has balanced fun activities that center GIS while providing opportunities for participants to get to know each other. Those digital interactions have strengthened our community and led to in-person gatherings at conferences including group meals and our annual Birds of a Feather sessions. We have found that consistently encouraging GIS-relevant social connection keeps our core community strong and engaged, allowing us to advance professional development and accomplish group goals and providing ideas for social gatherings or for classroom activities.

The Harmful Content and Description Interest Group will meet in a hybrid format to discuss best practices around topics such as addressing harmful content and language in collection material and implementing inclusive and reparative metadata practices. This birds-of-a-feather style meeting will include some interest group business and allow plenty of time for discussing successes, challenges, and questions.

Join members of the TDL OJS Users Group to learn about the Open Journal Systems platform for publishing Open Access scholary journals. This session will include a demonstration of OJS and opportunity to ask your most burning questions about how the application works and how TDL members use it to support library publishing.