This post was written by Rosalía Iriye, who attended the 2025 DLF Forum as a Student Fellow. The views and opinions expressed in this blog post are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Digital Library Federation or CLIR. 2025 Student Fellowships were supported by a grant from MetaArchive.
Rosalía Iriye is a Master in Library and Information Science at University of California – Los Angeles (UCLA), B.A. Labor Studies. She is currently the Digital Collections Manager for the UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE) labor archive, supporting in community digitization partnerships with labor organizations such as Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance (APALA AFL-CIO) LA chapter and Garment Worker Center. She previously worked on California State Library and National Endowment of the Humanities queer cataloging/reparative metadata grants with the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center library/archive. Iriye most recently interned in digital records management with the National Park Service, and volunteers in herbaria and natural history collections digitization with the UCLA Mathias Botanic Garden, Los Angeles County Arboretum & Botanic Garden, and California Botanic Garden. She hopes to learn more about digital preservation for public histories, exploring research data in environmental conservation and industrial/labor histories.
My graduate research explores how digital preservation requires a commitment to sustainability and labor, from open science and the research collections we preserve, to engaging critically and empathetically with our own digital workflows; I’ve seen these values emerge throughout the forum, and am grateful to have attended my first Digital Library Federation through this fellowship.
Plenary began with Dr. KáLyn “Kay” Coghill’s exploration of online protection against gender-based violence, and how we all, librarians and moreso as individuals, can contribute to digital gardens in our creation of online landscapes. Lightning talks followed such as Jonathan Page’s “A Brief History of Times Fighting Bots” and Lauren Turner’s “Start Here: Born-Digital Archiving in 5 Minutes (Spoiler: It’s a Journey, Not a Sprint)” that humanized the work surrounding today’s web-crawling, both protecting repositories from recent surges in data mining and the workflows needed to begin preservation internally. This work is so timely in the everchanging environment of digital preservation, yet grounding to assess our own capacities in a moment of constant change.
I went on to attend session introducing the systems-agnostic conceptual-model Delivering Archives and Digital Objects: a Conceptual Model (DadoCM). Emphasizing the relationship between archival and digital records across digital publishing platforms, I appreciated this model’s development from workshops across repositories and from open standards of International Image Interoperatability Framework (IIIF).
My interest in archival metadata and GIS expanded in geospatial librarianship when attending “Allmaps: Open Source Georeferencing for Historical Maps”, the workshop coinciding with the announcement of IIIF’s partnership with AllMaps. I was inspired by this commitment to open science and IIIF-delivery, with all georeferenced data from the software being published as openly licensed datasets. Explorations in open data grew from sessions providing toolkits and frameworks for data advocacy. Session “Why keep data science local? Case Studies from Two Universities Building Scholarly Indices with Open Data to Improve Institutional Data Literacy” saw value too beyond its open data, the panel conversation bridging seemingly localized skills of digital librarians into a network of relationships and research data collaboration.
Overarchingly, I’m fortunate to have attended collaborative session “Planning What’s Next for the DLF Climate Justice Working Group”, exploring critical approaches and information literacy to AI workflows and data center expansions in digital repositories. Conversations in later sessions grew from “Measuring and Critiquing genAI tools for Geographic Metadata Creation”, finding low accuracy in large language models’ (LLM) for generating geographic metadata for historic photograph and map collections. It was a grounding moment again, amidst adaptation in the digital world, to find more confidence in our geographies, our histories, and one another in its stewardship. Thank you again Digital Library Federation for the opportunity to travel to Denver for DLF Forum!