Recent years have seen tremendous growth in DLF’s vibrant and active liberal arts college community, which now represents more than 20% of the total membership of the DLF. In 2015, a volunteer planning committee from within our LAC community organized a one-day Liberal Arts Colleges Pre-conference, specifically created for those who work with digital libraries and/or digital scholarship at teaching-focused institutions, held before the DLF Forum in Vancouver. This event was a huge success, and included concurrent sessions of presentations and panels on pedagogical, organizational, and technological approaches to the digital humanities and digital scholarship, data curation, digital collections, and digital preservation. Presenters represented many regions and institution sizes, reflecting the strength and variety of the liberal arts within DLF.
A second #dlfLAC Pre-conference is planned for Sunday, November 6th, in conjunction with the 2016 DLF Forum in Milwaukee. Follow #dlfLAC commentary on Twitter!
DLF members will also be interested to know that our parent organization, CLIR, supports a number of initiatives related to liberal arts colleges. These include the meetings and discussions of our group of Liberal Arts College Chief Information Officers (CIOs), and the recent migration of NITLE to CLIR. DLF stays connected to and helps advise efforts like these.