DLF Forum Virtual Event Sessions

Thursday, April 13, 1pm-2pm ET: 
Centering Users: Developing a Community of Practice for User Experience & Archival Description (recording)
45-minute panel

Presented by Faith Charlton, Princeton University; Alison Clemens, Yale University; Betts Coup, Harvard University; Zoë Hill, Harvard University

Panelists will discuss their white paper “A Call to Action: User Experience & Inclusive Description,” which focuses on the need to prioritize user experience work in relation to archival description especially in light of increased engagement in reparative and inclusive descriptive projects.

Friday, April 14, 1pm-2pm ET: 
Convene, Discuss, Collaborate: Building a Transatlantic Digital Skills Community for Research Libraries During the Covid Pandemic (recording)
45-minute panel

Presented by Jason Clark, Montana State University; Susan Halfpenny, University of Aberdeen; William Nixon, RLUK

The ongoing development of diverse digital skills has never been more urgent for library professionals. This interactive panel will explore the creation of a community-driven, transatlantic skills exchange programme between US and UK research libraries which has placed the ‘individual’ and the ‘community’ at the heart of skills development.

This session is a combination of shorter presentations from the DLF Forum.

Presentation 1: From Stagnant to Dynamic: The Development of a New University of Florida Digital Collections

Presented by Todd Digby, University of Florida

The University of Florida’s Digital Collections (UFDC) system began in 2006. Since then, UFDC has grown to over 15 million pages organized into hundreds of partner and thematic collections. The prior system was a locally developed, digital library system that encompassed a single system for production and patron access. During the last 16 years, the system saw little in the way of modernization, especially on the public facing side. Over the past year we have released a major interface update that incorporates modern system, search, and design principles. The new system is also the first time the system has separation for production and patron access. In this talk I will share our decisions to continue to develop our own system, rather than use an existing platform, as well as our development process, including successes and hurdles, and our planned next steps. Explore the new University of Florida’s Digital Collections (UFDC) system and learn about decisions to develop our own system, rather than use an existing platform, as well as our development process, our successes and hurdles, and our planned next steps.

Presentation 2: Manumitted: The People Enslaved by Quakers

Presented by Avis Wanda McClinton; David Satten-Lopez

Manumitted: The People Enslaved by Quakers is a multi-year collaborative effort to publicize and investigate the history of Quaker slaveholding through the manumission papers housed at Haverford College. The project combines research, writing, community engagement, and digital tools to create an online platform for this history and the Pandora’s box it opens. McClinton and Satten-Lopez met through this project and developed it in collaboration with each other and others. From brainstorming improvements to the betasite, to editing essays and formatting on the website, they eventually showcased the project to a greater community, and Quaker community, in Upper Dublin, Atlantic City, and many Southern Appalachian states. In this presentation they strive to chart out their collaboration, and the centrality of community in that process, as well as promote McClinton’s further projects on Quaker slaveholding. As McClinton has said before, “It’s not about taking the names of the manumitted out of a dusty old book and putting them on a soon-to-be dusty website.” This presentation engages with the technological concerns surrounding accessibility and draws upon adaptiveness, even non-digital methods, to respond in a multiplicity of ways. Moreover it speaks to the commitments, technological or otherwise, that must be attended to when engaging with community. To view the website Manumitted see here: https://manumissions.haverford.edu/.

Presentation 3: Newspaper Navigator: Hosting the Dataset and Deploying the Search Application

Presented by Benjamin Lee, University of Washington; Chris Adams, Library of Congress

The millions of digitized historic newspaper pages within Chronicling America, a joint initiative between the Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities, represent an incredibly rich resource. Historians, journalists, genealogists, students, and members of the public explore the collection regularly via keyword search. But how do we navigate the abundant visual content in Chronicling America? In this talk, we will present Newspaper Navigator, created by one of the presenters (Ben Lee) through the Innovator in Residence program at the Library of Congress in collaboration with LC Labs, the National Digital Newspaper Program, and IT Design & Development at the Library of Congress, as well as Professor Daniel Weld at the University of Washington. In particular, we will discuss the technical and infrastructural challenges behind making the project publicly accessible. First, we will discuss hosting the Newspaper Navigator dataset consisting of extracted visual content from 16 million Chronicling America newspaper pages. Here, we will elaborate on two primary points of access: pre-packaged datasets for general users, as well as S3 endpoints for users to compute against the dataset. Second, we will describe deploying the Newspaper Navigator search application, which supports not only keyword search but interactive, machine learning-powered visual similarity search for 1.5 million photos from the dataset. Lastly, we will reflect on public usage of the dataset and search application since launching in 2020.

Presentation 4: Web archiving with Browsertrix Cloud!

Presented by Ilya Kreymer, webrecorder; Lorena Ramirez-Lopez, webrecorder; Hank Wilkinson, webrecorder

Webrecorder project builds tools that specialize in a ‘user-driven’ form of web archiving, where the user is able to direct the archiving process through their browser. One of our latest tools, Browsertrix Cloud (https://browsertrix.cloud/) , is an ambitious automated crawling system designed to make web archiving easier and more accessible for everyone. The system allows users to enter URLs to crawl and watch the crawler load each page, producing an interactive high-fidelity portable web archive. While originally planned as a hands-on workshop, as part of the presentation, we will demo the main features of Browsertrix Cloud, including archiving social media, tagging and metadata, and discuss how participants can try the latest version of the system on their own. We will also discuss how libraries can better take advantage of web archives, including integrating web archives along with other digital objects into their existing digital repository systems.

Friday, April 21, 1pm-2pm ET:
Days of Future Past: Why Race Matters in Metadata (recording)
45-minute panel

Presented by Kate Topham, Michigan State University; Julian Chambliss, Michigan State University; Justin Wigard, University of Richmond; Nicole Huff, Michigan State University

While marginalized as a juvenile medium, comics serve as an archive of our collective experience. Emerging with the modern city and deeply affected by race, class, and gender norms, comics are a means to understand the changes linked to identity and power in the United States. For further investigation, we turn to one such collective archive: the MSU Library Comics Art Collection (CAC), which contains over 300,000 comics and comics artifacts dating as far back as 1840. As noted on the MSU Special Collections’ website, “the focus of the collection is on published work in an effort to present a complete picture of what the American comics readership has seen, especially since the middle of the 20th century.” Given the unique opportunity this collection provides, a community of scholars and practitioners extracted metadata from the CAC to create the Comics as Data North America (CaDNA) dataset with the goal of exploring the production, content, and creative communities linked to comics in North America. This panel draws on the Comics as Data North America (CaDNA) dataset at Michigan State University to visualize patterns of racial depiction in North American comics from 1890-2018. Our visualization will highlight how comics serve as a visual record of representation and serve as a powerful marker of marginalization central to popular cultural narratives in the United States. By utilizing data visualization to explore the ways we codify and describe identity, we seek to call attention to the constructed nature of race in North America and the continuing work needed to imagine race beyond the confines of the established cultural legacy. Each presentation in this panel attends to a unique investigation of the CADNA dataset in order to uncover stories of racially minoritized groups and creators embedded or buried within the dataset. The first presentation details the problematic history of subject headings and explores critical issues in representing race both in the catalog and in linked open data. The second presentation considers the potential to understand racial erasure in North American comics. Next, we offer a genre study of subject headings within the dataset to visualize the contributions of Black and other persons of color representation in horror comics. Our final presentation centers a sequence of data visualizations highlighting comics created by Indigenous creators, as well as those that feature Indigenous people. These visualizations offer a glimpse on the dynamic way comic art offer a path to reflect on the complexity of identity in North America. In doing so, we call attention to the constructed nature of race and offer some clarity on the ways our contemporary debates about race and representation are a part of a pattern.

NDSA’s Digital Preservation also hosted presentations on February 23. Details about their event can be found on the NDSA website.

All sessions will be free and open to the public.