TCDL 2025

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Re-engineering Search in FromThePage
By: Sara Brumfield & Ben Brumfield

Searching archival collections across diverse institutions is challenging. Volunteers, genealogists, and librarians each have unique needs, from locating relevant crowdsourcing projects to tracing ancestral names or finding specific documents via metadata and call numbers. Our collections range from untranscribed scans to fully indexed texts enhanced by OCR and HTR systems, LLMs, or manual efforts.

This webinar will explain how we consolidated five distinct MySQL-backed search functionalities into a single search engine while still respecting organization scope and privacy restrictions.

Highlights include:

Rationale: Insights from user feedback and group meetings that prompted the integration.
Live Demo: Explore the new range of searches, from site-wide project discovery to detailed searches within an organization’s collections.
Challenges: Addressing issues like line-spanning words, markup variations, and multilingual content.
Emerging Issues: Adjusting to a unified search that demands detailed context for each result.
Results and Process: How last summer’s analytics led to surprising insights, user stories, and the development of a new product requirement document.
Future Possibilities: Opportunities for thematic, cross-institutional search portals.

Using Alma/Primo for Digital Collection Discovery and Access
By: Melanie Cofield & Misu Kim

This session focuses on demonstrating various ways academic libraries are leveraging the Alma/Primo Library Services Platform (LSP) to support digital collection discovery and access.

Over the last couple of decades, the go-to solutions for digital collection management and access among TDL members have been open source digital repository platforms and products like Avalon, DSpace, Islandora, and Samvera. A more recent development is the wide adoption of the Alma/Primo LSP among TDL member institutions. This is a product developed and hosted by Ex Libris, and the features within this platform to support digital collection management, discovery, access, and preservation are rapidly expanding.

As Alma/Primo becomes an integral part of our digital collection landscape, it seems timely to discuss how this system’s features complement those of others, share various approaches currently being employed (such as digital collection migrations, metadata harvesting, etc.), and consider possibilities on the near horizon.

Many academic libraries employ staff who do not hold an MLIS but contribute significantly to research support, digital scholarship, and collection management. Despite their expertise—often supported by advanced degrees in other disciplines—these professionals often face limited or unclear career advancement opportunities.

This panel will explore the challenges and possibilities for non-librarian staff seeking promotion within library systems. Panelists will share their experiences navigating institutional policies, advocating for recognition, and making decisions about further education. Discussion topics will include the role of advanced degrees, alternative promotion pathways, and strategies for fostering equitable career growth.

By bringing together voices from different institutional contexts, this session will offer insights into how libraries can better support professional development for all staff—regardless of job title.

As digital collection projects grow in complexity in cultural heritage institutions, so has the need for library professionals to step into the role of product owners. In the agile framework, a product owner is the liaison between the development team and the product stakeholders. This is often a solitary role requiring leadership, project management, communication, and advocacy. A role that isn’t taught but rather learned through years of experience… or a trial by fire. Is there any way to prepare for it? In this Idea Lab, we will learn from each other’s challenges and successes, create community around a shared experience, and identify creative strategies for helping each other make this solitary role more library-centered.

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!

TDL DSpace Users Group

The annual in-person meeting of the TDL DSpace Users Group (DUG) is open to all conference attendees interested in the DSpace open repository platform. This year’s meeting will feature a presentation on using the DSpace Entities framework (building on a lightning talk presented earlier in the conference), as well as updates on upcoming releases of DSpace and open time for discussion.

The TDL DUG works to create an active community among DSpace users that facilitates mutual support for DSpace use and repository management; takes on collective projects for the benefit of the TDL consortium; and connects the TDL user community to the global open source DSpace community.