The Digital Library Federation is a robust and diverse community of practitioners who advance research, teaching, and learning through the application of digital library research, technology, and services. The Forum is a working meeting where DLF members come together to discover better methods of working through sharing and collaboration. It serves as a resource and catalyst for collaboration among digital library developers, project managers, and all who are invested in digital library issues.

Participation is open to all those interested in contributing to and playing an active part in the successful future of digital libraries, museums, and archives services and collections. In that spirit, and to maximize the Forum’s benefit and better facilitate the community’s work, the Forum’s schedule will provide many opportunities to actively engage and network.

For the 2013 DLF Forum, the Program Planning Committee is requesting proposals within the broad framework of digital collections and their effect on libraries, museums and archives services, infrastructure, resources, and organizational priorities. Proposals should strive to contribute to the following topics:

• Digital technology design
• Management and assessment
• Data
• Collaboration

We welcome proposals on these and other areas from current community members and non-members who are interested in joining the DLF community. For more detailed examples, please see the 2012 DLF Forum schedule: http://www.diglib.org/forums/2012forum/2012-dlf-forum-schedule/.

Session Genres

• Presentations and Panels: Traditional lecture format with question-and-answer sessions. Speakers are requested to use only half of the allocated time for the presentation, including how they wish to engage the DLF community in their work. The second half of the session should focus on conversations about next steps, engagement with the community, and clarification of points raised during the presentation.
• Workshops:
 In-depth, hands-on training about a tool, technique, workflow, etc. You can recommend a topic or trainer, or you can volunteer to share your own expertise.
• Research Updates: An opportunity for those working in digital collections research to present their preliminary findings for community feedback and discussion.
• Working Sessions: 
Creative problem solvers, including project managers, developers, and/or administrators, gather to address a specific problem. This does not have to be a computational problem. The approach can be applied to workflow issues, metadata transformations, or other complex problems that would benefit from a collective, dynamic solution approach.
• Community Idea Exchange: A modified poster session. Presenters will have the opportunity to interact with Forum participants to discuss their current research projects, and/or demonstrate tools or services they have developed or are using in their digital library environment. Demos must include a poster element.

Proposal Submission Guidelines and Evaluation Procedures

Complete proposals should be submitted using the online submission form by 11:59 PM on June 28, 2013. Proposals must include a title, session leader, session genre, proposal description (maximum 300 words), and proposal abstract (maximum 100 words).

After an initial review by the Program Planning Committee, all proposals will be posted on the DLF website for community polling. The community vote will be taken into consideration, and the Program Planning Committee will make the final decisions. Those that submitted complete proposals will be notified of their status by August 9, 2013. Presenters will be guaranteed a registration place.

The 2013 DLF Forum will be held in Austin, TX at the AT&T Executive Education and Conference Center, November 3–6, 2013. More information about the Forum can be found at http://www.diglib.org/forums/2013forum.

2013 DLF Forum Program Planning Committee

Aaron Choate – University of Texas
Ann Frenkel – University of California, Riverside
Brian Rosenblum – University of Kansas
Cathy Aster – Stanford University
Cristela Garcia-Spitz – University of California, San Diego
Edward Bilodeau – McGill University
Harriett Green – University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Jennifer Weintraub - University of California, Los Angeles
Lois Widmer - University of Florida
Michael Giarlo - Pennsylvania State University
Michelle Dalmau - Indiana University
Neil J. McElroy - Lafayette College
Patricia Hswe - Pennsylvania State University
Sandra McIntyre - Mountain West Digital Library
Sara Schmidt - Schreiner University

If you are interesting in playing a vital role in shaping the 2013 DLF Forum, please send Jena Winberry (jwinberry [at] clir [dot] org) a letter of interest by February 22, 2013. We will announce the Program Planning Committee membership by the beginning of March.

It is long overdue that we need to hack the conference experience. There needs to be a mashup of the traditional conference experience with the dynamic conversational tone of an unconference. There should be more realtime sharing and interaction between audience and presenter, and time for brainstorming and exchanging thoughts and ideas that result from presentations, in a way the captures and sustains the conversation long after we check out of the conference hotel.

Granted, it is common for conferences to have a Twitter hashtag, but are the questions and ideas posed on the backchannel churned up and contributed to the “live action” in the room? Sure, the sessions are live streamed, but how is virtual participation structured so that it can be a meaningful experience? Some conferences are doing a great job of this, but they are seldom professional library conferences. In this time of reduced resources to support professional development, we need to demand more of our conferences and meetings.

With this in mind, the 2012 DLF Forum program planning committee used a number of strategies to maximize interaction and dynamic participation.

First, we minimized the number of sessions that followed a traditional presentation format. In addition to panels and presentations, the Forum had working sessions, project updates, workshops, several preconference unconferences, and a community marketplace. Descriptions of all these session types are spelled out in the call for proposals. The overarching goal of these alternative session types is to create an opportunity for conversation between the presenters and the DLF community. For example, the working session Tales from the Cloud focused on sharing experiences of cloud adoption, the decisions that led there, migration strategies and considerations, and technical implications of cloud usage in a preservation context. The idea was that panel members would share their experiences in a session that was structured to have a conversation with the audience.

Second, we maximized opportunities for interaction between speakers, session leaders, and conference participants. Not only did the Forum have a Twitter hashtag (#dlfforum) and archive tweets, but we also asked that all the speakers share their presentations via SlideShare and we provided the opportunity for collaborative notetaking using an open GoogleDoc for each session. The collaborative notetaking was inspired by a recent symposium titled Take Note held by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. These notes—which can be found through a link to the original GoogleDoc at the bottom of each session page—were used to create a summary report of the 2012 Forum sessions.

Our third strategy to enhance interaction at the Forum was to offer “more room at the inn.” Digital library conversations span many topics, including data management, digital humanities, and scholarly publishing. Often, these conversations happen within “home” communities or in silos, when the issues cut across many stakeholder groups and would benefit from having a broad open discussion. So how do we encourage new voices from outside of the core digital library community to join the conversation? Our solution was to position the Forum as a hub meeting, while providing meeting and logistic support for other groups to “spoke” from. This year, preconference meetings included the METS editorial board meeting, the Taiga Forum 8, CURATECamp, and THATCamp. The Scholarly International Infrastructure Technical Summit met directly after. These pre- and post-conference meetings encouraged many who had never attended a DLF Forum to test the waters. This year we had more than 230 attendees from organizations that ranged from research universities and liberals arts colleges to independent organizations and service providers.

In planning a meeting, it is often the small details that can make a difference. This year, in addition to maximizing interactivity, we wanted to minimize our carbon footprint. The DLF greening initiative started last year as a way to reduce paper by using SlideShare to distribute presentations and the Guidebook app to post the conference schedule. This year, we expanded our efforts to include distributing water bottles in place of offering bottled water at breaks, and using recycled/recyclable name badges with compostable badge holders.

On the basis of early evaluations, it seems our efforts have paid off: attendees were pleased with our efforts to support a broader range of participation. But there is always room to improve. Next year we’d like to live stream the event, but in a way that our remote participants can feel that they are part of the Forum, and not just watching it. We hope to expand the conference by a day to avoid overlapping sessions. But most importantly, we’ll be thinking about how we can sustain those good conversations that started at the 2012 Forum in a way that carries our whole community forward until we meet again, in Austin Texas in 2013. Stay tuned … we are working on that!

Originally posted on clir.org November 28, 2012.

Each of the Forum Fellows will receive complimentary hotel, travel, board, and registration (up to $1,000) to attend the 2012 DLF Forum in Denver, CO. Fellowships are awarded to librarians, library staff, and LIS students new to the profession, based on strength of application essay, nomination, and resume.

This year’s Forum will be held November 4-5 in Denver, CO, with pre- and post-conference events taking place November 2, 3, and 6.

2012 DLF Forum Fellows

Harriett Green is the English and Digital Humanities Librarian and assistant professor of library administration at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests include the usability of digital humanities tools and digital collections, research methods of humanities scholars, and humanities data curation. Her publications include articles in College & Research Libraries (forthcoming November 2012), and the Journal of the Chicago Colloquium for Digital Humanities and Computer Science, as well as a contribution to Web Analytics Strategies for Libraries: A LITA Guide (forthcoming winter 2013). Her current research projects include being Principal Investigator on an XSEDE Allocation grant, and serving on the research teams for the Hathi Trust Research Center and Bamboo Technology Project. She is professionally active in the Association for College and Research Libraries, the Association for Computing in the Humanities (ACH), and the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing (ALLC). She earned her MSLIS from the University of Illinois, and also holds a MA in Humanities/Creative Writing from the University of Chicago and a BA in History and Literature from Harvard University.

Alix Keener is a current student at the University of Michigan School of Information, specializing in Library and Information Science. She has also been part of MPublishing’s Digital Production department since June of 2010, where she does digital conversion and production for the ACLS Humanities E-Book project. In addition to librarianship, her interests include digital preservation, book conservation, digital scholarly publishing, scholarly communication, and learning Python (and the list keeps growing with each week of classes). Alix will receive her MSI in 2014.

Wendy Kozlowski is the Science Data and Metadata Librarian at Cornell University. She is also Cornell’s Research Data Management Service Group (RDMSG) coordinator, serving as the liaison between the RDMSG participants, the RDMSG management council and the RDMSG faculty advisory board. As metadata librarian, Wendy’s work focuses on issues related to research data creation, management, sharing and curation, as well as on outreach and consultation efforts regarding information management and scientific data support needs. She has a B.A. in biology from Boston University and a M.S. in ecology from San Diego State University. Prior to coming to Cornell, Wendy spent 19 years in biology and oceanography research, working on multidisciplinary data sets and with teams from numerous institutions both in and outside the United States.

Mike Nutt is a Fellow at the North Carolina State University Libraries, where he works in both the Digital Library Initiatives and External Relations departments. His work has involved the facilitation of content strategies for the five large video walls that are
architecturally integrated into the new James B. Hunt Jr. Library, scheduled to open in January. He is also leading a strategic initiative called “Networked Library: Marketing the 21st Century
Library.” He received his Master of Science in Information Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. During his time at UNC-CH, he founded the student group Carolina Digital Story Lab and was a research assistant at the Carolina Digital Library and Archives.

Emily Frieda Shaw joined the University of Iowa Libraries as Digital Preservation Librarian in 2012. In this new position, she is working to incorporate preservation thinking and actions into the creation and management of Iowa’s digital collections. Emily received a B.A. in Anthropology from Barnard College, and completed an M.S. in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign in 2008. While working toward her M.S. and a Certificate of Advanced Study in Digital Libraries, she researched and taught undergraduate courses in communication, worked with archives and circulating collections in Library Conservation, and helped manage the Library’s mass digitization partnership with Google Books. After many years as a graduate student, Emily is excited to join formally join the profession at a DLF member library.

*****

We received many wonderful applications for the Forum Fellowship this year and it was a very difficult decision. We would like to thank everyone who sent in an application and encourage you to apply again next year!

The Digital Library Federation is excited to announce that Kathleen Fitzpatrick will give the keynote address at the 2012 DLF Forum in Denver, CO. Ms. Fitzpatrick is Director of Scholarly Communication of the Modern Language Association, and Professor of Media Studies (on leave), Pomona College. She is author of Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy, published in 2011 by NYU Press and previously made available for open peer review online (http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/mcpress/plannedobsolescence), and of The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television, published in 2006 by Vanderbilt University Press. She is co-founder of the digital scholarly network MediaCommons (http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org), and has published in journals including the Journal of Scholarly Publishing, the Journal of Electronic Publishing, PMLA, Contemporary Literature, and Cinema Journal.

The keynote address will take place at 9AM on Sunday, November 4. See our Schedule for more details.

Please visit our registration page to view registration and pricing details. All set? Register now! We look forward to seeing you in Denver.

There are a lot of exciting projects and ideas in our community right now and we received a great bunch of proposals for the 2012 DLF Forum. We’re asking the DLF community to vote on which sessions you would most like to see on the 2012 DLF Forum schedule.

The Program Planning Committee will use the community votes to guide final program selection and craft a Forum informed by the community’s interests.

Please visit our community poll and cast your votes! Please only one ballot per person.

Thanks for your help in shaping the 2012 DLF Forum schedule.

The 2012 Digital Library Federation (DLF) Forum is seeking proposals for presentations, panel discussions, workshops, research updates, and hands-on, problem-solving sessions. The Forum is a working meeting where DLF members come together to discover better methods of working through sharing and collaboration. Participation is open to all those interested in contributing to and playing an active part in the successful future of digital libraries, museums and archives services and collections.

Managing the digital content lifecycle is a complex challenge, requiring creative and collaborative approaches. In that spirit, and to maximize the Forum’s benefit and better facilitate the community’s work, the Forum’s schedule will provide many opportunities to actively engage and network.

For the 2012 DLF Forum, the Program Planning Committee is requesting proposals within the broad framework of digital collections and their effect on libraries, museums and archives services, infrastructure, resources, and organizational priorities. Proposals should strive to contribute to the following topics:

• Digital technology design
• Management and assessment
• Data
• Collaboration

We welcome proposals on these and other areas from current community members and non-members who are interested in joining the DLF community. For more detailed examples, please see the 2011 DLF Forum schedule: http://www.diglib.org/forums/2011forum/schedule/.

Session genres include:
Presentations and Panels: Traditional lecture format with question-and-answer sessions. Speakers are requested to use only half of the allocated time for the presentation, including how they wish to engage the DLF community in their work. The second half of the session should focus on conversations about next steps, engagement with the community, and clarification of points raised during the presentation.

Workshops:
 In-depth, hands-on training about a tool, technique, workflow, etc. You can recommend a topic or trainer, or you can volunteer to share your own expertise.

Research Updates: An opportunity for those working in digital collections research to present their preliminary findings for community feedback and discussion.

Working Sessions:
 Creative problem solvers, including project managers, developers, and/or administrators, gather to address a specific problem. This does not have to be a computational problem. The approach can be applied to workflow issues, metadata transformations, or other complex problems that would benefit from a collective, dynamic solution approach.

Community Showcase: A modified poster session. Presenters will have the opportunity to interact with Forum participants to discuss their current research projects, and/or demonstrate tools or services they have developed or are using in their digital library environment. Demos must include a poster element.

Proposal Submission Guidelines and Evaluation Procedures
Complete proposals should be submitted using the online submission form by 11:59 PM on July 1, 2012. Proposals must include a title, session leader, session genre, proposal description (maximum 300 words), and proposal abstract (maximum 100 words).

After an initial review by the Program Planning Committee, all proposals will be posted on the DLF website for community polling. The community vote will be taken into consideration, and the Program Planning Committee will make the final decisions. Those submitting complete proposals will be notified of their status by August 10, 2012. Presenters will be guaranteed a registration place.

The 2012 DLF Forum will be held at the Downtown Westin in Denver, CO from November 3 – 5, 2012. More information about the 2012 DLF Forum can be found at http://www.diglib.org/forums/2012forum/.