Membership Cohorts

We host lots of thematic working groups, engaging individual community members and reaching well beyond the institutions that support DLF as members. But as our institutional membershipship grows and becomes more heterogeneous, we see added value in supporting cohorts–groups of DLF institutions that share common challenges and opportunities.

Here are our first two such membership cohorts. If you would like to: take a leadership role in our DLF Liberal Arts Colleges or DLF Museums cohorts; foster institutional connections among similar organizations not covered here; or help DLF bolster membership in institutional categories that matter to you–please get in touch!

DLF Liberal Arts Colleges

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 first, 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. Both this event and the one that followed in Milwaukee (2016) were huge successes, including 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 third pre-conference — this time an unconference hosted in collaboration with the HBCU Library Alliance — occurred just before the 2017 DLF Forum in Pittsburgh. Our theme was digital libraries and digital library pedagogy as common ground between liberal arts colleges/programs and HBCUs (historically black colleges and universities).

Follow #dlfLAC commentary on Twitter and check out the 2017 #dlfLAC Pre-Conference page for more information about the event! Loretta Parham’s keynote speech and the shared note taking documents from the day are also available.

Many DLF liberal arts college librarians take part in our working groups, including a vibrant one on Digital Library Pedagogy — #DLFteach!

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), placement of CLIR postdocs in liberal arts college libraries, and the recent migration, for program evaluation, of NITLE to CLIR. DLF stays connected and helps advise efforts like these. We’ve also sponsored events at liberal arts colleges, like a recent digital humanities symposium at Vassar College, and the first DH/digital scholarship conference at Bucknell University.

DLF Museums Cohort

Since 2015, we have partnered with Kress to foster a museums cohort within DLF. The cohort is a space for the community to discuss digital collections questions that are particular to museums and museum libraries, and to tackle topics that resonate across museums, archives, and libraries. Current institutional members include:

  • Philadelphia Museum of Art
  • New York Art Resources (NYARC) Consortium
    • The Brooklyn Museum
    • The Frick Collection
    • MoMA, the Museum of Modern Art
  • Smithsonian Institution Libraries
  • Getty Research Institute
  • The Alliance of HBCU Museums and Galleries
  • The Andy Warhol Museum
  • Art Institute of Chicago
  • Cleveland Museum of Art
  • The Corning Museum of Glass
  • The Huntington Library, Art Collection, and Botanical Gardens
  • Maryland Institute College of Art
  • The Menil Collection
  • Museum of Impact
  • National Gallery of Art
  • New Museum
  • The Obama Foundation
  • Peabody Essex Museum Phillips Library
  • Seattle Art Museum Libraries
  • as well as campus museums at our 170+ other member institutions!

Anyone with museum interests or who engages in public or academic museum-based projects is welcome to participate in DLF Museums Cohort conversations, regardless of their institution’s DLF membership.

Learn more about Cohort activities.

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