TCDL 2025

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.

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.

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.

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.

The TDR Steering Committee’s annual meeting is an opportunity for its members to meet in person to determine strategic goals for the coming year and review user and member activity in the repository. This meeting is for TDR Steering Committee members and their institutional colleagues, though guests may be admitted on an ad hoc basis if approved by the committee. Only committee members will vote.

This meeting is closed to the public.

Piloting DSpace Entities for TDL-hosted Repositories
By: Nicholas Woodward & Kristi Park

Since version 7, the DSpace repository platform has featured an “Entities Framework” for creating object types other than simple items, including, for instance, the ability to create Person objects that can be linked to other object types like Publications. In summer 2024, Texas Digital Library staff began working with librarians at UT San Antonio to pilot the implementation of this framework in TDL-hosted DSpace repositories, with the aim of determining a path to migrate existing repository content into the Entities Framework. This lightning talk will present a brief overview of this pilot project, its aims and deliverables, along with our conclusions and next steps for implementing Entities for TDL members.

Making MicroLearning Macro: Building Online Learning Infrastructure at Scale
By: Henna Punjabi

In 2022, Texas State University Libraries received more instruction requests with less librarians to respond. To meet this demand, they reimagined their library instruction to offer digital learning objects for faculty to use in their course sites. For courses that needed specialized instruction, librarians were still available to teach in a flipped-classroom setting, after students completed the digital materials. This allowed students to learn at point of need, and the digital-first instruction alleviated the demand on the instruction librarians. This iteration did not last long; too much customized coding and a lack of reusability with the library website led the instructional designer to rethink the delivery methods entirely. Using digital tools already available, including SpringShare LibGuides, Canvas, and H5P interactives, the instructional designer transformed the content to solve the problems of quality control, brand consistency, and reusability, while better meeting the learning needs of the students. Now, even as the learning objects continue to iterate, there is a sustainable system for future growth. This lightning talk will highlight how to use digital tools creatively to solve problems while maintaining stability and sustainability in the collection.

Visualizing the Artists' Books Collection at Texas Tech University
By: Emily Grover

In 2024, the Texas Tech University Rare Books Department completed a project to create a visual library of approximately 350 artists' books representing the work of twentieth and twenty-first century creatives from around the world. This lightning talk will explore the ways in which this visual database of artists' books enhances the information available in the more traditional online public access catalog. Particularly, I consider the pedagogical value of the digital library in the context of a university course in making artists' books.

Cleaning Days: A Method for Digitization Lab Maintenance
By: Marcia McIntosh, Brianna Guerrero & Christina Kellum

Some of the production of the University of North Texas (UNT) Digital Projects digitization lab can be viewed online in the Portal to Texas History and the UNT Digital Library. While the contribution to over two million of items available there is a fine achievement, the daily upkeep -- and the dust-bunnies fought to complete that work -- does not get as much attention. This presentation will feature the cleaning routine implemented for a large lab area that employs many people. It will discuss how Cleaning Days were designed, set up, and allowed every employee to take part in maintaining the space to the benefit of all.

Join the TDL Open Knowledge [Access] Interest Group for an informal Birds of a Feather session on Open Access and other open scholarship topics. Whether you're deeply involved in open initiatives or just curious, this roundtable offers a space to share ideas, discuss challenges, and explore opportunities in the open knowledge ecosystem. No interest group membership required—everyone is welcome!