This post was written by Darcy Ruppert, who attended the 2025 DLF Forum as a Public Library Worker 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. The 2025 Public Library Worker Fellowship was supported by Platinum sponsor AM Quartex.
Darcy Ruppert is an archivist and librarian living and working in the greater Seattle area. Since receiving their MLIS from the University of Washington in 2023, Darcy has worked in various museums, special collections, and community archives, specializing in the digital preservation of audiovisual collections. Their professional work has been defined by a commitment towards democratizing access to digital archives themselves and the tools of digital preservation. They are currently managing King County Library System’s Memory Lab, a Mellon Foundation-funded community oral history project with a mission to record, preserve, and share the stories of King County.
I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to attend my first DLF Forum as a 2025 Public Library Worker Fellow. In my current work as project manager for a new community oral history project based out of a large public library system, I often feel somewhat separate from the day-to-day of the rest of my organization. The work that I do connects to and is born out of the work of the library, but the unique nature of the program within my organization means that I am often working through problems and making decisions on my own. For this and many other reasons, it was refreshing to be surrounded by a community of my professional peers who are facing similar challenges and grappling with similar emergent questions, both practical and philosophical, within our field.
The first day’s opening plenary by Dr. Kay Coghill provided, for me, a grounding moment at the very beginning of the Forum. Dr. Coghill shared an entreaty for all of us, as digital library professionals and as human beings, to use our platforms, skills, and resources to mitigate harms to members of systemically marginalized groups in digital spaces. Their incisive talk made me think about my own positionality in digital spaces, and drove me to reflect on my own professional decisions and the cascading effects these (at times, seemingly small) decisions can have. In the work that we do, I think it’s easy to become complacent, to lose sight of the fact that we hold power to protect and, by the same token, harm, when we introduce new solutions without appropriate testing, community consultation, and evaluation. I think there’s a real danger in our field of focusing so much on integrating new technologies and providing “results” to our institutions that we may passively introduce real risks into the lives of our users and members of our greater community.
With Dr. Coghill’s talk framing the rest of the Forum for me, I think I appreciated the sessions I attended with a rejuvenated perspective towards care and stewardship. I thought about the race to adopt “industry standard” digital preservation tools, and what we lose when we fail to properly evaluate these tools for the unique needs of our organizations and user groups. At the University of Denver’s session on curating digital exhibits, I reflected on our ability as cultural heritage stewards to uplift and uncover marginalized voices rather than bend to dominate cultural narratives. At a session on AI-powered transcription, I considered the balance of risk and reward that is inherent to the world of LLMs. I’m thankful for all of the speakers who generously shared their work at the Forum, and for the opportunity to reflect on these important issues alongside my peers.