Hue Thi Pham (@huetpham) is Head of Training and Research Support Division at Hanoi University Library, Vietnam and a Research Associate at Monash University, Australia. She attended the Forum as the 2016 DLF+Force11 Cross-Pollinator.
I am very grateful to have been a recipient of the 2016 DLF + FORCE11 Cross-Pollinator award to attend the DLF Forum 2016 in Milwaukee. This was the first DLF conference that I have participated in, so I came full of excitement. I hoped that my participation in this Forum would not only help extend my knowledge of the current digital library developments, but also cultivate my research interests in interdisciplinary collaboration, digital scholarship, scholarly communication, and e-research infrastructures. I am both a librarian and a researcher, and I received my PhD from Monash University, Australia just a week before the Forum started!
My experience with the DLF Forum was incredibly helpful in enriching my understanding of the digital scholarship concept and practice, far more than I had expected. Interesting presentations emerged throughout the Forum, and achievements and challenges in building digital scholarship were central to the discussions of the various digital humanities projects, particularly issues of metadata management, data infrastructure, human resources and technologies used in institutions across the country. I was impressed with the large-scale collaborative projects in which resources and knowledge have been effectively shared among inter-organization members taking advantage of various digital communication platforms.
While many presentations were outstanding, the one I enjoyed the most was Digital Preservation Partnership: Extending Resources and Expanding Knowledge through Collaboration/ the ones I got the most benefit from was Data Curation Network/ the highlight of the Forum was the keynote speech All Labor is Local by Stacie Williams.
I also enjoyed learning new technological skills during the training sessions for librarians at the Pre-conference. Although a one-hour training session is not enough to teach software fully, it does provide an excellent overview of the possibilities digital library software offers. It is important to have a sound understanding of current technologies to develop ideas for future digital scholarship projects in my workplace.
The DLF Forum 2016 was exceptional in bringing together the diversity of academics, technologists and library professionals, emphasizing successful collaboration through the cross-pollination of ideas about digital scholarship, libraries and scholarly communication. It appears that such interdisciplinary collaboration has underpinned the sustainable development of all the three fields. The Forum was closed by the motivating Open Invitation panel session that aimed at seeking interested partners to get involved in working groups and collaborative partnerships, and inspiring members’ new initiatives.
I would like to thank FORCE11 and DLF sponsors especially for granting me this cross-pollinator award. I am looking forward to stay engaged with the two communities and developing opportunities for future collaboration.
