DLF Forum Recap and Working Group News

2017 Forum Photos

We’d like to extend a huge thank you to all the presenters, attendees, and planning committee members who made the DLF Forum and our affiliated events such a great community gathering last month.

This roundup, an expansion on the final 2017 Forum newsletter, offer highlights from the week, as well as info about how to stay connected until the #DLFvillage reconvenes in Las Vegas, Nevada (October 15-17).

 

There are lots of ways to catch up on Forum happenings:

DLF Working Group Activities

The Forum is an important place for DLF’s working groups to reflect on past activities and make plans for the future. Here’s a peek at some groups’ in-person meetings this year.

Digital Library Pedagogy Group

The Digital Library Pedagogy group led a curriculum-development workshop at DLF, as well as hosted a curriculum review and small group discussion during a working breakfast. The group has a few projects in development, including a DOCC (distributed open collaborative course), that will be going live 2018. Keep an eye out on #dlfteach Slack, Twitter, or the email list for more information. The group is also calling for new leadership! If you’d like to volunteer to be a group or subgroup co-leader, please contact Elizabeth Kelly (ejkelly@loyno.edu) or Eleanor Dickson (dicksone@illinois.edu).

Technologies of Surveillance Group

At the 2017 DLF Forum, a new working group was formed, dedicated to interrogating our relationships with data collection technologies. The Technologies of Surveillance Group came out of the Surveyance or Surveillance? Working Lunch at the Forum. Libraries are increasingly investing in systems that can track and correlate user behavior. This group will interrogate the methods and ethical implications of these technologies and seeks to establish guidelines for how to operationalize interrogation of technology, whether in systems that we create or purchase, or through our classroom instruction.

Shea Swauger and Yasmeen Shorish are the inaugural conveners of this group. As we work to populate the DLF Wiki and hammer out other start-up logistics, sign up to join the DLF-administered Technologies of Surveillance listserv. If you gave your email at the working lunch, you will be automatically added. You can also use #panoptitech to tag stories on Twitter that you think are relevant to this group’s work. We are looking forward to building this community with you!

Labor Working Group

Despite its 8am start, the Labor Working Group’s working breakfast was a lively place for discussion about community member concerns and how we might work for shared solutions. We have thorough notes in the #w0a conference note document, however a few highlights have been:

  • Take on your local library school’s requirement that interns not be paid even when working at well-resourced institutions,
  • Hold conversations about / research the labor model of identity-based contingent positions,
  • Create resources for those transitioning to full-time positions for the first time,
  • Design/sponsor workshops on union organizing,

And explore how our skills at organizing things can be used to organize (outside of unions) for better labor conditions.

The Labor Group’s Contingency/Precarity subgroup has also been looking for comments on their outline for guidelines for designing better grant-funded positions http://bit.ly/LaborGrantGuidelines. If you’d like to start reaching out and getting involved, there are a number of ways to participate:

Project Managers Group

The Project Managers Group meets during the Forum and throughout the year via teleconference. Discussion topics are posted to the DLF PMG listserv. To join the upcoming planning meeting, please email cyork@jhu.edu to be added to the conference call.

Assessment Interest Group

The AIG Content Reuse subgroup is currently conducting an IMLS-funded needs assessment,“Developing a Framework for Measuring Reuse of Digital Objects,” which aims to determine desired functionality for a future reuse assessment toolkit. The team used its meeting during the DLF Forum to prepare for their first in-person focus group meeting, which occurred at the close of the Forum. Eight in-person focus group participants kindly shared their thoughts and perspectives on the complexities and challenges of understanding content reuse and the promising possibilities that reuse brings to digital cultural heritage assessment. The results of this focus group will be combined with future in-person and virtual focus group data and will ultimately lead to a series of use cases and functional requirements for a future assessment toolkit. More information about the project, including updates on our progress, can be found at the Team’s website. Individuals can also follow up with Santi Thompson (sathompson3@uh.edu) if they have any questions.

The AIG Metadata Working Group met for a working lunch session at DLF Forum to debrief and discuss all the work we’ve done in the past year. This work has included creating a Metadata Application Profile Clearinghouse for application profiles and mappings, ongoing work on a repository for metadata assessment tools repository, creating a general metadata assessment framework, a metadata analysis workshop and a Twitter chat. Potential work and collaborations for the upcoming year was also discussed during the lunch session. This conversation will continue in our next meeting, which will be on Thursday, November 30th at 11 am Eastern/ 8 am Pacific. More information on the group can be found on the group wiki page and on our Toolkit website.

Government Records Transparency and Accountability Interest Group

The Government Records Transparency and Accountability interest group met in person for the first time at this year’s DLF forum. At their working lunch (notes here) they looked back on the work they did in the ten months since they first came together, and began planning for the months and years to come. Our next meeting is scheduled for Friday, December 1 at 1pm EST. On the agenda for that day: planning for the second annual Endangered Data Week (which will take place from February 26-March 2, 2018). Feel free to join! If you’d like to get involved (or just receive updates about their ongoing work) join the Google Group.

With Thanks.

We would like to thank our 2017 Forum & Digital Preservation committee members, sponsors, and fellowship partners, who helped make the week possible. Read about opportunities to sponsor in 2018.

Contribute to the DLF Childcare Fund.

#GivingTuesday is November 28th! You can help us provide childcare services at the Forum by contributing to the DLF Childcare Fund. Keep an eye out for reminders in the week ahead.

Staying Connected

To keep up with DLF news, join the community listserv or follow us on Twitter! For Forum news, subscribe to the newsletter.

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