Did you know DLF’s Museums Cohort is 5 years old?
Begun in 2015 with generous support from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, DLF’s Museums Cohort originated as an exclusive group of member museums. After an open call for new members was held in 2018, the Cohort expanded its membership with fourteen additional museums. Since 2019, participation in DLF’s Museums Cohort has been open to all, regardless of institutional membership or affiliation and our monthly cohort meetings have become a space for practitioners across disciplinary and institutional boundaries to come together to build skills, share ideas, strengthen digital engagement and collections, and advance technological initiatives in service of their common missions.
The Museums Cohort meets on the fourth Wednesday of every month at 2 PM ET/11 AM PT, welcoming presenters from institutions all over to discuss digital collections questions and other topics that resonate across museums, libraries, and archives. Some topics covered in the past couple of years at our monthly calls include:
- Digital infrastructure in museum libraries and archives
- Tribal collections and archives at Chickaloon Native Village
- IIIF’s Museums Community Group
- Using BitCurator in a museum setting
- Using controlled vocabularies and adding entries to Getty’s Art & Architecture ThesaurusÂ
We have several presentations recorded and available on our YouTube channel, including our most recent meeting where we had the pleasure of welcoming presenters from the British Museum Library to discuss the library’s transition to its first new library management system in over twenty years!
To meet the group’s evolving needs as the Museums Cohort progressed from a small and exclusive group of DLF members to one of DLF’s working groups (which means the Cohort is open to anyone engaged in public or academic-based museum projects or just those with museums interests), we’ve recently created the DLF Museums Cohort listserv. This listserv is open to all, and aims to be a space to foster open dialogue and collaboration between Museums Cohort participants and other GLAM professionals outside of our regular meetings.
Subscribe to the Museums Cohort listserv
In similar fashion, beginning with September’s meeting, the Museums Cohort will begin holding meetings without a pre-planned topic, allowing for more informal share-outs from attendees to promote projects they’ve worked on, share tools and techniques they think will be useful to the group, or to ask attendees for feedback on problems they’re currently encountering in a project. We’ll hold these meetings every other month, alternating with our regular meetings featuring invited speakers and more formal presentations.
It’s been exciting to see DLF’s Museums Cohort grow and develop into a no-cost, low-barrier meeting space for the GLAM community over the past five years. We hope you’ll join us as we continue to evolveÂ
Our September meeting takes place Wednesday, September 23 at 2 PM ET/11 AM PT. Subscribe to the DLF Museums Cohort listserv for reminders and announcements.Â
Interested in leading the Museums Cohort? Is there a problem in the museums field you’d like to help solve in collaboration with other Museums Cohort members? We want to hear from you! Contact us at info@diglib.org to learn more.
