TCDL 2025

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.