DLF

DLF
Digital Library Federation
	Metadata During COVID
This post was written by members of the Metadata Working Group, a subgroup of DLF’s Assessment Interest Group. Digital collections work has changed in a number of ways during the COVID-19 pandemic. For many libraries and archives, this has meant working remotely and shifting toward tasks that can be done online. Within the DLF AIG Metadata Working Group, members have discussed a number of ways that organizations have chosen to increase capacity for metadata, transcription, and other tasks related to digital collections as a way of providing work for employees who would normally work in public-serving positions. This post documents some of those projects and activities.  University of North Texas   At the University of North Texas, our Digital Collections use a web-based metadata editing interface and we can add as many users as needed. When the stay-at-home order went into effect right after spring break, many of our library staff members (including full-time librarians/staff and part-time student workers) were no longer able to do their regular jobs and we offered metadata as an alternative. We added about 100 new editors to our system in March 2020. Additionally, we added some quickly-drafted documentation to steer people toward easy metadata projects and known issues that require clean-up (like fixing name formatting). To keep oversight manageable, new editors were still attached to their own departments (or assigned to one that needed help), with a central contact person for each department and a specific sub-set of projects. Our team of developers rushed an overhaul of the event tracking system that documents who is editing and what records they are changing so that managers could more easily verify if workers were editing when they said they were working. Tracking edits has also let us measure how significantly overall editing has increased. Multiple times since this started, we have had at least one editor working during every hour of the day. Having so many relatively-untrained editors has resulted in a large number of issues that will need to be reviewed, but we have tools built into our system to help identify those issues and have added them to our ongoing list of things to fix. Overall, this was still an extremely positive experience since the increase in editors allowed significant progress or completion of work that would not have been done otherwise.  – Hannah Tarver University of Utah Marriott Library At the University of Utah, the COVID-19 pandemic pivot to remote work prompted the launch of transcription projects, both with handwritten materials from special collections and newspaper OCR correction. This includes the transcription of 34,000 employee records by our Digital Operations student employees which resulted in the complete transcription of the Kennecott Miner Records collection.  We are also using Omeka Classic with the Scripto plug-in as the platform for manuscript transcription projects and are able to find valuable work for people to engage in when they couldn’t physically be at the library.  In addition, we developed a born-digital crowdsourced digital collection, the Utah COVID-19 Digital Collection designed to capture what is currently happening during this unusual time. We’ve gotten a great response from the University and larger Utah communities, with over 800 contributions so far available in the digital library. The COVID-19 Digital Collection has enabled us to build new partnerships and provided the library with outreach opportunities. An article detailing the project is forthcoming in a special issue of the journal Digital Library Perspectives. – Anna Neatrour Utah State Archives  After starting with From the Page a few months earlier, moving staff and volunteers to transcription and indexing projects proved to be successful. Contributors finished a historical court case (and now working on a second one) and a year’s worth of birth certificates in only a few months using the web-based interface that integrates with CONTENTdm digital collections. With a built-in notes feature, questions can be asked and answered directly on a document’s page, which will then be exported along with the rest of the metadata. We are now preparing to open up the birth certificate indexing to the general public with additional training materials. In addition, new digital collections have been published, even with metadata developed remotely, using tools like Google Sheets for input and then converting to delimited text files for import. – Gina Strack University of Texas at Austin At the start of March, the University of Texas Libraries Collections Portal, the public-facing search and discovery interface for our Digital Asset Management System (DAMS), included approximately 2,500 items. Shortly after, the UT-Austin campus closed and many staff members from the Libraries’ first-line customer service, acquisitions and cataloging units found their roles pivoting to create metadata remotely for our DAMS system. Collection curators within UT Libraries created large-scale digital projects to help ensure continued remote work and to utilize this unusual time to turn their focus to projects that had been placed on the back burner due to more pressing obligations. Our Digital Asset Management System Coordinator and staff from our Preservation and Digital Stewardship unit created flexible pathways to support these projects and to ensure successful ingests into the DAMS. Staff at the Architecture & Planning Library and the Alexander Architectural Archives, the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, and the Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection dedicated themselves to ingesting and describing large amounts of digital items, increasing our total number of items available online to over 20,000 by September. Digital objects newly available online as a result of this unprecedented, organization-wide collaborative effort include over 2,000 digitized architectural drawings and images, 14 historic books from the Benson Rare Book Collection and Primeros Libros de las Américas, and 14,138 scanned maps. The University of Texas Libraries documented the experience and provided a more detailed explanation of our DAMS in TexLibris. – Mandy Ryan Colgate University Colgate University’s Special Collections and University Archives (SCUA) is documenting the Colgate community’s experiences and stories of COVID-19.  Digital contributions can be submitted at any time via a Google Form and may be added to Colgate’s Digital Collections portal. There Read More
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	Three New NDSA Members
Since January 2021, the NDSA Coordinating Committee unanimously voted to welcome three new members. Each of these members bring a host of skills and experience to our group. Please help us to welcome: Arkivum: Arkivum is recognized internationally for its expertise in the archiving and digital preservation of valuable data and digitized assets in large volumes and multiple formats. Colorado State University Libraries: Colorado State University Libraries’ digital preservation activities has focused on web archiving, targeted born-digital collecting, along with collection development and preservation guidelines for its digital repository. Vassar College Libraries: Vassar College Libraries are committed to supporting a framework of sustainable access to our digital collections and to participate locally, nationally, and globally with other cultural and professional organizations and institutions in efforts to preserve, augment, and disseminate our collective documentary heritage. Each organization has participants in one or more of the various NDSA interest and working groups, so keep an eye out for them on your calls and be sure to give them a shout out. Please join me in welcoming our new members. A complete list of NDSA members is on our website. In future, NDSA is moving to a quarterly process for reviewing membership applications. Announcements for new members will be scheduled accordingly. ~ Nathan Tallman, Vice Chair of the NDSA Coordinating Committee
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	Virtual 2020 NDSA Digital Preservation recordings available online!
Session recordings from the virtual 2020 NDSA Digital Preservation conference are now available on NDSA’s YouTube channel, as well as on Aviary. The full program from Digital Preservation 2020: Get Active with Digital Preservation, which took place online November 12, 2020, is free and open to the public. NDSA is an affiliate of the Digital Library Federation (DLF) and the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). Each year, NDSA’s annual Digital Preservation conference is held alongside the DLF Forum and acts as a crucial venue for intellectual exchange, community-building, development of good practices, and national agenda-setting for digital stewardship. Enjoy, Tricia Patterson; DigiPres 2020 Vice-Chair, 2021 Chair
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	Announcing Finnish Translations of the 2019 Levels of Preservation Matrix and Assessment Tool
The NDSA is pleased to announce that the 2019 Levels of Preservation documents have been translated into Finnish by our colleagues from CSC – IT Center for Science and the Finnish digital preservation collaboration group.  Translations for the Assessment Tool Template and both versions of the Levels of Digital Preservation Matrix were completed.   Links to these documents are found on the 2019 Levels of Digital Preservation OSF site (https://osf.io/qgz98/) as well as below. Levels of Digital Preservation Matrices and the Assessment Template: urn:nbn:fi-fe202101101409   If you would be interested in translating the Levels of Digital Preservation V2.0 into another language please contact us at ndsa.digipres@gmail.com.     Suomenkieliset käännökset vuoden 2019 pitkäaikaissäilyttämisen tasot dokumentteihin NDSA:lla on ilo ilmoittaa, että CSC – IT Center for Science ja PAS-yhteistyöryhmä ovat yhteistyössä kääntäneet pitkäaikaissäilyttämisen tasot dokumentit suomeksi. Käännökset arviointityökaluun ja matriisin ovat valmiita. Linkit dokumentteihin löytyvät OSF verkkosivustolta (https://osf.io/qgz98/) ja alta. urn:nbn:fi-fe202101101409    
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	CLIR Now Hiring: Senior Program Officer, DLF
CLIR is now seeking applicants for a Senior Program Officer to lead the Digital Library Federation (DLF) program. This position will play a pivotal role in the strategic direction of DLF and provide vital leadership and guidance both within CLIR and the wider community. In line with the program’s mission, the Senior Program Officer will serve as an advocate for research, learning, social justice, and the public good. At CLIR we believe a team with a wide variety of experiences, viewpoints, wisdom, and backgrounds makes for a healthier, stronger organization, and enables us to increase our impact as we collectively work toward more inclusive and useful information infrastructures. We encourage applications from all those who are qualified and interested, including Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color; individuals with disabilities; veterans; and intersectional individuals.  Please find the full job description and learn how to apply here.
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	Levels of Digital Preservation Digital Curation Decision Guide Published
It is with great pleasure to announce that the Levels of Digital Preservation work continues to roll out. In these waning days of 2020, the Curatorial Team of the Levels has released its first published edition of the Digital Curation Decision Guide. This guide forms the basis of a series of decision points around collections and the implementation of a preservation strategy. It is not just for the preservation specialist but rather, it attempts to highlight the preservation implications of collections decisions. It is the group’s desire that the Guide will facilitate dialogue between and among stakeholders across a given organization and inculcate a preservation mindset without necessarily having to be a deep expert. It is also not prescriptive. It is a non-linear exploration of multiple vectors that make up curatorial decision-making such as collection development, intellectual and security considerations, and technical capacity. The Guide has both a visual and prose version to explore from different angles the basic factors in complex infrastructure and collections management decisions.  The Decision Guide will be extended in the future, linking up with other efforts such as actively maintained working definitions, policy frameworks and examples, as well as the revision of the Levels, themselves. I would like to thank the many people who gave us exceptional feedback along the way. This group started in late 2018 and worked for two years to craft something we hope will form a part of your organizational practice. In particular, I want to spotlight the work of the individuals who stuck it out to the very end: Angela Beking – (co-Chair) Library and Archives Canada Bradley Daigle (co-Chair) – University of Virginia / APTrust Ian Collins – University of Illinois Chicago Tawnya Keller – University of Utah Donald Mennerich – NYU Libraries Rosalyn Metz – Emory University Leah Prescott – Georgetown University Law Library Nathan Tallman – Penn State University Walker Sampson – University of Colorado Boulder David Underdown – The National Archives (UK) Simon Wilson – Independent Archivist Lauren Work – University of Virginia This group represents a broad spectrum of organizational perspective and creative talent. Thanks to their collective effort, we have something that we hope will be of use to the community. That said, we also understand that the Digital Curation Decision Guide is just the beginning and that with increased use and refinement, we will need to update and improve on what we have started. We hope that you, the preservation community (broadly defined), use this guide to engage your colleagues and provide the clear pathways to preserving our cultural record. ~ Bradley Daigle, Curation Working Group Chair
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	DLF Forum Community Journalist Reflection: Lisa Covington
This post was written by Lisa Covington (@prof_cov), who was selected to be one of this year’s virtual DLF Forum Community Journalists. Lisa Covington, MA is a PhD Candidate at The University of Iowa studying Sociology of Education, Digital Humanities and African American Studies. Her dissertation work is “Mediating Black Girlhood: A Multi-level Comparative Analysis of Narrative Feature Films.” This research identifies mechanisms in which media operates as an institution, (mis)informing individual and social ontological knowledge.   In 2020, Lisa received the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Award from the Iowa Department of Human Rights. She is the Director of the Ethnic Studies Leadership Academy in Iowa City, an educational leadership program for Black youth, in middle school and high school, to learn African American advocacy through incorporating digital humanities and social sciences.    Lisa received her MA from San Diego State University in Women & Gender Studies. As a youth development professional, Lisa develops curriculum for weekly programming with girls of color, trains teachers on best practices for working with underrepresented youth, and directs programs in preschool through college settings in California, Pennsylvania, Iowa, New Jersey, New York and Washington, D.C.  What is DLF? Where does equity fit into conversations? Is this a space where my scholarship is valued? These are the questions I asked myself as I planned to attend my first DLF conference.  I was uncertain about the DLF community and what would be considered worthy of discussion in this space. These were the thoughts I had as I prepared for the opening plenary of the 2020 DLF conference. Honestly, I was hopeful when I saw Stacey Patton was speaking. I am familiar with her work as a historian, professor, journalist and as an advocate on behalf of Black children. Hopeful, I listened and learned. One thing that Patton said that remained with me throughout the conference:    “Galleries, Libraries, Archives & Museums (GLAMs) reflect the ways in which white people colonize information but also serve as gatekeepers of information related to themselves. When archives were originally set up, Black names weren’t important unless they were attached to the names of an important white person who owned slaves or was some kind of white savior to Black people.” As I understood Dr. Patton’s statement during the DLF Opening Plenary, I was glad to hear those words for two reasons. It was refreshing to have a conference begin on the note of connecting modern-day oppressions to the profession and, secondly, the serious impact it has on Black and Brown people and the archives that reflect our identities. The uprisings and protests taking place in 2020 demanding the end of police brutality while asserting Black Lives Matter across professions, walks of life and locale. The marches, the rallies and public outcry demand the end of police brutality while declaring Black humanity is worthy of existence: a sign of the times. Today, as we prepare to enter 2021, we can no longer point to the 1960s as winning the fight for civil rights. Will the history books say that we were on the side of justice or oppression? We collectively bear witness to social unrest stemming from state sanctioned violence against Black men, women and children in the United States. What followed was mass deployment of solidarity statements across universities, businesses and organizations. Also, during this time, people across careers trajectories and higher education fields often went to Twitter to talk about how their employer needs their opinion, the lack of inclusive curriculum or their department asks them to be on the diversity committee of one. It was the first time I had ever witnessed a collision between social injustice, academia and organizations. So why now? Why was Patton daring us to challenge oppression when it appears that releasing statements is enough?  But then I thought about moving across country for graduate school. No university official checked on my well-being even though it was months after Sandra Bland was murdered in Texas. When Alfred Olongo was murdered in California, no teacher or administrator at any school I ever attended asked how this impacted me as a student. But now: an abundance of statements addressing equity? Our work with archives is no different. We can make inclusive claims or create just practices.  During the DLF opening plenary Patton’s acknowledgement to us of the daily violence—physically and disciplinarily—allowed us to honestly consider the necessary but difficult work of implementing just practices. She asked for and demanded accountability for the historical neglect of Black archives across GLAMs.    Patton further asked, “…is there a version of this kind of erasure happening in the galleries, libraries, archives, museums where there’s still baked-in inequality from a century ago?” The answer to this is clear in what is preserved with intention and what is ignored. Whose history is preserved? What history is deserted? As curators, stewards and preservationists, it is our duty to develop intentional, concrete practices to ensure oppression does not continue in GLAMs. The possibility of this rests in our daily and hourly commitment, or negligence, to just practices. It was hopeful to see several BIPOC folks and allies model commitment to justice and equity throughout the digital humanities.  In honoring an elder and first archivist at Allen University—Ms. Wilhelmina Broughton—Carol Bowers, Courtney Rounds & Sloane Clark shared the curation of the archive. Ms. Broughton contributed much to South Carolina communities during her 30 years of teaching in public schools (1964-1995) and work as the first archivist at Allen University for 20 years (1999-Present). As with many of our institutions, when one person leaves their knowledge leaves with them, but we see other possibilities through what Allen University created: honoring a living legend and incorporating Ms. Broughton’s institutional knowledge, with PastPerfect software, to create the archive.   Another session brought a thoughtful approach to Black people who were victims of state sanctioned violence. In her presentation on systems honoring these victims, Gina Nortonsmith of the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project thoughtfully included trigger warnings. I have rarely heard Read More
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	Calls for Volunteers for 2021 Digital Preservation Conference
The NDSA calls for volunteers to join our Planning Committee for the 2021 Digital Preservation conference. Digital Preservation (DigiPres) is the NDSA’s annual conference – open to members and non-members alike – focused on stewardship, curation, and preservation of digital information and cultural heritage. The 2021 meeting will take place on November 10-11th 2021 in St. Louis, Missouri, just after the DLF Forum.  NDSA is an affiliate of the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) and the Digital Library Federation (DLF), and the DigiPres conference is held in concert with the annual DLF Forum. CLIR continues to monitor the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and after successfully pivoting to a virtual format for 2020, will be making a call on this for 2021 by early spring 2021.  Planning Committee responsibilities include: Defining a vision for the conference Crafting and distributing a Call for Proposals Reviewing and selecting proposals Identifying a keynote speaker Determining the conference schedule Moderating sessions Supporting membership through recruitment and mentorship efforts Collaborating with the DLF Forum planning committee on community events, equity and inclusion, and sponsorship opportunities We expect to have monthly group calls from January-November, and this year’s committee will have an exciting opportunity to creatively sustain some of the conveniences and benefits of our virtual platform as we negotiate meeting in person again.  Join us by completing this form by Friday, January 15th, and please share widely. We look forward to working with you! Tricia Patterson, 2021 Chair Jes Neal, 2021 Vice Chair/2022 Chair
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	DLF Forum Community Journalist Reflection: Betsy Yoon
This post was written by Betsy Yoon (@betsyoon), who was selected to be one of this year’s virtual DLF Forum Community Journalists. Betsy Yoon (she/they) is an Adjunct Assistant Professor and OER/Reference Librarian at the College of Staten Island, CUNY and earned her MLIS in 2019. She also has a Master of International Affairs. She lives in occupied Lenapehoking and is a longtime member of Nodutdol, a grassroots organization of diasporic Koreans and comrades working to advance peace, decolonization, and self-determination on the Korean Peninsula and Turtle Island (North America). Interests include critical approaches to OER and openness, the free/libre software movement, understanding and addressing root causes over symptom management, and the role that libraries and archives can play in our collective liberation. One advantage of attending a virtual Forum is the fact that you no longer have to decide between two interesting panels that are happening at the same time. Before I realized that the sessions would be pre-recorded and available for viewing any time, I pored over the schedule trying to decide which of the two sessions to participate in per time block. What complicated my decision-making process was the fact that I was attending with two different angles. As a librarian, I do reference and work related to Open Educational Resources on my campus. But I am also part of Nodutdol(1), a community organization with a 20-year history in need of archiving and preservation. While not totally distinct (outreach is relevant for both roles, for instance), my two roles occasionally had divergent needs. For example, the Monday 5:00 pm session had both “Where It’s At: Using GIS Tools for Engagement and Outreach at an HBCU Library,” which seemed a good fit for my position in the academic library, and “Linked While Apart: Overcoming Division with Linked Data,” which seemed more applicable to my work with Nodutdol. So you can imagine my delight when I learned that not only would the sessions be available for asynchronous viewing, but that it would also be possible to engage in discussions about the panel on Slack. The panel that ended up being the most informative for my specific needs was “Finding a Good Fit: Scaling Best Practices for Born-Digital Material to Fit the Needs of Diverse Communities.” The presenters walked us through the process of setting up a small-scale digitization project and emphasized the iterative nature of the process. As a grassroots organization, we do not have the luxury of hiring digitization experts to guide us through the process, and it has been difficult to know how and where to get started. Margo Padilla’s saying that “good enough” digital preservation practices (as opposed to best practices) stood out to me as particularly relevant to my organization’s needs. The description of their organization’s custom modular setup and the numerous resources that the slides linked out to were also very helpful in offering some solid starting points to embark on a “good enough” digital preservation process. I also found the Learn@DLF sessions to be valuable in their specificity–in particular, I found the tools introduced in “Wax and Jekyll to build minimal digital projects” and “Oral History as data: Lightweight, static tool for publishing and analyzing transcripts” to be accessible in that they did not necessarily require investing time in a comprehensive platform or software and instead had relatively low barriers to entry. Wax, for example, describes itself as a “minimal computing project for producing digital exhibitions focused on longevity, low costs, and flexibility.” While not exactly the same, the spirit behind minimal computing reminded me of SPLOTs (what the acronym stands for is not yet fixed — one interpretation is Smallest Portable Open Learning Technology), which are intended to have low barriers to entry and “support more accessible, sustainable, and user-friendly ways to get publicly-engaged learning happening on the open web.” The question of platforms and sustainability is a topic that is directly relevant to my work in Open Educational Resources and with Nodutdol, and I always love to learn about technologies that provide access to knowledge creation mechanisms without locking you in to a specific system. Though the fact that this year’s DLF Forum was digital was due to the constraints of the pandemic, the thoughtful way in which the experience was designed was due to the efforts of the organizers. The asynchronous viewing options, the Slack interface, the provision of presentation slides and transcripts all made it possible for organizations such as mine to benefit from the expertise of the DLF community. While an in-person DLF Forum will no doubt have different considerations, I hope that some of the innovations of this year will be retained for future forums to ensure wide accessibility and participation from a wide variety of organizations and individuals. As a first-time DLF Forum participant, I am grateful to have been able to participate in this year’s virtual forum and look forward to continuing to learn from the DLF community! (1) Nodutdol is a grassroots organization of diasporic Koreans and comrades based in Lenapehoking/New York City seeking to advance peace, decolonization, and self-determination on the Korean Peninsula and on Turtle Island/North America. We advance our mission through political education, collective action, and principled solidarity.
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	DLF Forum Community Journalist Reflection: Carolina Hernandez
This post was written by Carolina Hernandez (@carolina_hrndz), who was selected to be one of this year’s virtual DLF Forum Community Journalists. Carolina Hernandez is currently an Instruction Librarian at the University of Houston where she collaborates on creating inclusive learning environments for students. Previously, she was the Journalism Librarian at the University of Oregon, where she co-managed the Oregon Digital Newspaper Program. Her MLIS is from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her current research interests are in critical information literacy, inclusive pedagogy, and most recently, the intersection of digital collections and pedagogy.  I have been interested in attending the DLF Forum for a few years now, but the timing was never quite right until this year. With the conference being both online and free, it was a no brainer for me to finally attend. Considering I am an Instruction Librarian, though, it may seem like an odd choice for me. However, in part because of my previous experience with curating the Oregon Digital Newspaper Project at the University of Oregon, I’ve been interested in exploring the many ways digital library technologies and digital collections themselves can be incorporated into information literacy instruction. With COVID-19 entirely moving our instruction to the online realm, this interest has become an imperative. This conference has confirmed for me that there are many ways these areas intersect and could inform my instructional approach. While many of the sessions I watched did not directly address pedagogy, there was still so much I was able to glean from the presentations that I could take back to my realm. The main thing that popped out at me was the way so many presenters addressed accessibility in one way or another. Of course, this stood out the most with the “Creating Accessible and Inclusive Content” combo session, which began with Rebecca Bayeck’s clarification of the difference between accessibility and inclusivity, two terms that are often used interchangeably. While accessibility is more about making sure that the final product is “usable by people with all abilities,” Bayeck made the important distinction that inclusivity goes a step beyond that to also make sure individuals “feel comfortable/safe when using [it].” This is something I try to keep in mind when lesson planning, how it’s important to not only make sure that students are able to access the learning materials in whatever way works best for them, but that they also find the relevance of information literacy to their own lives. In another presentation from this session, Daniella Levy-Pinto and Mark Weiler noted some of these issues, such as “unlabeled buttons or links,” which can be hard to identify properly for those using screen readers. In fact, several presenters and attendees emphasized the importance of testing platforms and content with screen readers. Carli Spina also spoke about the importance of including audio descriptions and transcripts for audio-video content and also mentioned specific tools, such as CADET, that can help create these necessary points of access. CADET, or Caption and Description Editing Tool, is free and allows you to create captions and timed scripts, but it can also be used to more easily add audio descriptions.  It was helpful to see some of these accessibility best practices in action via the conference itself. Because presentations were recorded in advance, they were able to include both closed captioning and transcripts for each one. Conference coordinators encouraged attendees to make their postings in Slack accessible as well by including image descriptions whenever a picture was included. This emphasized for me how it’s not only important to create accessible learning materials, but to foster a community that encourages others to follow suit. It is a helpful model for my instruction team as we move forward with helping our liaison colleagues with their own instruction. As I’ve been considering how to build lesson plans and activities around digital collections, the other session that stood out to me was the panel “US Latino DH: Recovering the Past, Creating the Future.” The presenters Gabriela Baeza Ventura, Carolina Villarroel, Linda Garcia Merchant, and Lorena Gauthereau spoke about the US Latino Digital Humanities Program based at the University of Houston, my current institution. This made their work immediately relevant to mine, as they are already working with part of the same community I teach. What stood out to me most, though, was their use of “Omeka as Pedagogy.” Baeza Ventura talked about her specific experience with teaching an undergraduate class wherein students used Omeka to curate an exhibit, thus allowing them to “contribute to knowledge production.” This Freirean approach to teaching is very much in line with our instruction team’s programmatic information literacy outcomes, which focus on encouraging students to see themselves as information creators. With a lot about the coming year still up in the air, my team and I plan to continue our efforts to strengthen both the synchronous and asynchronous online learning content we offer as it seems likely the demand for online teaching will certainly not go away. I am looking forward to bringing a lot of these ideas from the DLF community back to my department and finding ways to incorporate them into our pedagogy.
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	DLF Forum Community Journalist Reflection: Rebecca Bayeck
This post was written by Rebecca Bayeck (@rybayeck), who was selected to be one of this year’s virtual DLF Forum Community Journalists. Rebecca Y. Bayeck is a dual-PhD holder in Learning Design & Technology and Comparative & International Education from the Pennsylvania State University. Currently a CLIR postdoctoral fellow at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture where she engages in digital research, data curation, and inclusive design. Her interdisciplinary research is at the interface of several fields including the learning sciences, literacy studies, and game studies. At this intersection, she explores literacies and learning in games, particularly board games, the interaction of culture, space, and context on design, learning, research, literacies.  The year 2020 is, without a doubt, complex, filled with multiple challenges as well as opportunities. From remote working/online learning environments to conferencing in a virtual space, everyone has tried and is still trying to adjust to the “new normal” or maybe “new abnormal”. Among those adjusting to the world of social distancing is the Digital Library Federation (DLF) Forum. The 2020 DLF Forum was my first introduction to and participation in the work completed by this community of librarians and library enthusiasts.   The 2020 DLF Forum was in a virtual format. Though I would have loved to visit Baltimore, interact in-person with my CLIR cohort, and experience the food culture of Baltimore restaurants, the virtual space still provided a space for encounters and meaningful interactions. The conference organizers used two platforms: Aviary for pre-recorded presentation viewing and Slack for questions and dialogue with attendees. Both platforms created a unique and complimentary online experience. For instance, each video had captions and a downloadable transcript, making the content more accessible. Slack discussions created a sense of community, and gave me a sense of belonging through the interaction among participants. It was a common practice for participants through emojis to like, applaud, or reply to a post/comment (Figure 1). Slack’s direct message option further personalized my experience of the online conference. I directly exchanged with some attendees, and established personal rapport. However, my major takeaway from the 2020 DLF Forum was inclusion, shown in the accessibility efforts deployed by the organizers, and in the diversity of topics covered by presenters. The conference brought to the forefront research/topics that have received less attention in the past, and should be discussed today across disciplines and fields.  Stacy Reardon and Michael Lange from UC Berkeley presentation on Can We Digitize This? Should We? Navigating Ethics, Law, and Policy in Bringing Collections to Digital Life was so inspiring. In my view, it captured the essence of digitization and how it should be done. It is important for individuals engaged in digitization efforts to always ask whether “the value to cultural communities, researchers, or the public outweighs the potential for harm or exploitation of the people, resources, or knowledge.”  It is about not harming or causing harm to the various stakeholders who will see or engage with our final product. This balancing principle can be applied to any research, design, development, or digitization endeavors. Paraphrasing Stacey Patton, 2020 DLF Forum plenary keynote speaker, “how the knowledge came about, [who it will harm, and who will claim ownership of it] is as important as the knowledge itself.” Juliet Hardesty from Indiana University’s presentation on Mitigating Bias Through Controlled Vocabularies gave a powerful insight into why it is important to incorporate community vocabulary to broaden access to knowledge/data, and fight biases.  Being a panelist in the session Creating accessible and inclusive content and presenting on Addressing Issues of Accessibility: Urgency in a World of Social Distancing, added to my experience. My interest in issues of accessibility for blind/low vision, deaf/hard of hearing individuals in this era of social distancing facilitated conversation with other session presenters on the accessibility of this conference for screen reader users. From our conversation, it became obvious that the organizers needed to be commended for providing scripts and captions for the recorded videos. Dee, who is blind and uses a screen reader to access contents, and Micky, who is sighted, but did use a screen reader said about their experiences:  Dee: I do appreciate knowing that there is a caption and there is like, the scripts and everything. It does make you feel more welcome and it does make you realize yes, they’re making an effort. Applause should be given for, you know, for the effort and definitely you know even the fact there is like, an accessibility session or stream, that’s important. Micky: But if I could say one thing is, I think, I know people were making efforts into making it accessible. I think applause is very much deserved. and I think keep, we got to keep trying and we gotta keep finding innovative ways of working together and collaborating. So I would want people to feel encouraged that there’s more work to be done. But let’s pursue it as a team and then pursue it together because it’s worth it. Nevertheless, Dee and Micky did have some suggestions for creating accessible conference experiences:  Dee: The first thing I may say would be to include in the planning committee. Kind of representation from all the groups that you would like to have at the conference, because they will help think about, in this case, about screen readers and which tool and will it be interactive and you know if we want to make it interactive, is there an option or how can we? You know, it’s necessary for someone to think about those things…ensure to have broad representation in the planning committee, or if not in the planning committee, make a point to reach out and consult. So, engage with people with lived experience of whatever the conference you know is trying to accomplish.  Micky:  If I could make a suggestion that might just be to have a panel with like, just in this particular case, disabled leaders in the GLAM field. you know there’s, I’m sure, a ton out there Read More
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	DLF Forum Community Journalist Reflection: Ana Hilda Figueroa de Jesús
This post was written by Ana Hilda Figueroa de Jesús, who was selected to be one of this year’s virtual DLF Forum Community Journalists. Ana Hilda Figueroa de Jesús will be graduating next spring from the Universidad de Puerto Rico in Río Piedras with a BA in History of Art. Her research interest focuses on education, accessibility and publicity of minority, revolutionary Puerto Rican art including topics such as race, gender and transnationalism. She has interned at Visión Doble: Journal of Criticism and History of Art, and volunteered at MECA International Art Fair 2019 and Instituto Nueva Escuela. Ana works as assistant for the curator and director of the Museum of History, Anthropology and Art at UPR. She is currently a Katzenberger Art History Intern at Smithsonian Libraries. Community, a repeated concept during the 2020 Virtual DLF Forum, transitioned from a word to a mantra. From my home in Puerto Rico, I listened and learned from peers who shared their professional and academic experiences. It was my first time attending this Forum. Lots of questions popped into my mind, particularly: Why would staff insist on creating a virtual “community,” of four days duration, with an audience currently experiencing and being exposed to social injustice within their surroundings and media? What does “building a community” mean?  I would like to thank the DLF staff’s commitment. When I received notice that I was selected as a Community Journalist, my first observation was my last name. The correct spelling and grammar of my name are much more than my cover letter, it represents and brings value to where I come from and those who came before me. I noticed the correct inclusion of the accent mark on “de Jesús.” In that moment I knew my voice would be respected in the discourse. The physical distance between attendees was no obstacle. The Forum implemented digital platforms such as Slack and Aviary. Presentations included transcripts and, since they were previously recorded, I could pause and rewind the video when a new term was introduced. If anyone had a tech problem or just wasn’t familiar with the apps, staff was available to help immediately. Each speaker mentioned their preferred pronouns and acknowledged the indigenous homelands from where they spoke. Being inclusive both in theory and practice was a priority. As a Puerto Rican woman of color with low resources, a first-generation college student and an undergraduate scholar, I saw benefit in this opportunity.   The Forum sessions reminded me of particular aspects of archives as spaces of data justice, cultural and social responsibility, knowledge production, and alternate historical narratives. In Mitigating Bias Through Controlled Vocabularies, Juliet Hardesty explained the importance of being conscious of racial categories, first nation groups, non-binary people, and others when including metadata such as subjects, genres, and languages. As an example, she discussed linked data across institutions and the distinction between “exactMatch” and “closeMatch.” Through this conference, I sought to learn and carry out new interdisciplinary perspectives in my roles as a Katzenberger Art History Intern at Smithsonian Institution Libraries and as an Assistant to the Curator and Director at the History, Anthropology and Art Museum of the University of Puerto Rico. One of the most relevant presentations for me was Curationist: Designing a Metadata Standard and Taxonomy for an Open Cultural Ecosystem by Sharon Mizota. She explained the anti-colonialist, anti-racist, feminist, queer, accessible, and multilingual lens of data. Also, she examined taxonomy guidelines that included sensitive subject areas. To illustrate this, she reflected on adopting the terms “Latinx” instead of “Latino” or “Hispanic,” and “homeless people” instead of “homelessness” or “tramp.”  I also attended discussions of human rights movements such as BLM, Community Activism and Digital Archiving in the Era of George Floyd. Other social matters were considered in the lightning talk titled Pandemic Pivot: How to Take Your Event Online, Reach New Audiences, and Build Even Stronger Communities, and the panel Creating a Virtual Community for Virtual Reality: Challenges and Solutions for Program Building During a Pandemic. Another engaging talk was US Latino Digital Humanities: Recovering the Past, Creating the Future. I would like to mention a crucial keynote by Dr. Linda Garcia Merchant when discussing Chicana feminist scholar Maria Cotera, [The importance of understanding] “the archive as a living active experience of “encuentro” between the present and the past, with the potential to enact new strategies of allegiance and a new praxis”. I believe that this idea of encounter is linked with the DLF Forum’s “building a community” proposal. We must review our reactions and interactions with each other, including those within academia. Our involvement with the writing of histories makes us judges of how and what is told. Something I learned from this experience is that beyond our professional responsibilities, we have a social contract and accountability. Information must be accessible to traditionally marginalized public. Stories, agents and terms that once were excluded from the official narrative must be taken into consideration. The 2020 Virtual DLF Forum included more than spaces for education. It was about feedback, mutual aid, being open to new perspectives, and building a community.    
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	DLF Forum Community Journalist Reflection: Arabeth Balasko
This post was written by Arabeth Balasko, who was selected to be one of this year’s virtual DLF Forum Community Journalists. Arabeth Balasko (she/her) is an archivist and historian dedicated to public service and proactive stewardship. As a professional archivist, her overarching goals are to curate collections that follow a shared standardization practice, are user-centric, and are searchable and accessible to all via physical and digital platforms. She believes that an archive should be a welcoming place for all people and should be an inclusive environment which advocates to collect, preserve, and make accessible the stories and histories of diverse voices. By getting individuals involved in telling THEIR story and making THEIR history part of the ever-growing story of humanity, we all win! The Dawn of the Great Archival Shift Over centuries, archives and archivists have been heralded as the keepers, the stewards of records, stories, and collective memory. However, at times this stewardship has come from a place of exclusion, centered heavily around white, English-speaking experiences. Countless stories, memories, and events have been omitted from the larger historical narrative or have been rewritten from a skewed perspective. Now (and unfortunately for centuries) racism and police brutality has permeated our country’s history. Lack of racial equity has led to whitewashed and white supremacy-based collection policies that are geared towards uplifting and showcasing one-sided narratives, while often overlooking, overwriting, and suppressing contributions and accolades of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. So many times, it is easier for folks in the GLAM sectors to claim neutrality, to leave it to the next generation, to look the other way, and focus only on the past and occasionally, the present. From being overworked, under-supported, and oftentimes misunderstood, archivists have grown tired, and with tiredness comes apathy. Other times it is simply not knowing what to do and/or not having the “authority” to make actual changes in an organization. This too leads to burnout, turnover, and once again, apathy. The humanities profession’s lack of diversity and equity has engrained a culture of dysfunction in several of the GLAM organizations across the country. During the 2020 DLF Forum, it was apparent that I was not the only person who felt this way. Several of the sessions focused on how to become a more proactive, mindful, and accountable steward, while also taking care of your own mental health and well-being. From practicing mindfulness and relaxation techniques, to reflecting upon language choices in metadata and/or finding aids, to reviewing your institution’s digitally available content for equity and inclusiveness; this conference truly spoke to my soul in many different ways. However, during the conference, one overarching question that I continued asking myself was – “How can I, as an archivist, ensure that all folks feel represented in an archive? Is this possible?” Upon a week’s reflection and allowing myself some time to digest the rich information and ideas posed during these diverse sessions, I came to reframe my question as, “What can we as archivists do to support the fight for archival equity?” In my opinion, one big step archival repositories and the archivists in those repositories can take is to not promote the idea of neutrality. Oftentimes, archives can shy away from hard histories, hard conversations – they can minimize hurts, and maximize virtues, but I feel that is a misstep. History is ugly, sad, beautiful, heartwarming, heartbreaking, and real. It happened. You cannot change that. BUT you can work to showcase how it happened, why it happened, and help reshape it for today’s generation through modernized lenses. By uplifting the stories and voices of BIPOC folks, which have traditionally been omitted from the collected narrative for centuries, and reinterpreting and reclaiming the stories of those lost, overwritten, and marginalized throughout history, archival repositories can truly become beacons of change throughout the GLAM sectors. Many folks, especially those who identify as BIPOC, feel they are not represented in an archive – or if they are, their stories and experiences have been retold without their voice, their input, or their permission. As an archivist it is so important to work to build relationships and connections with communities and foster and tend to those relationships over the years. So many times, archival organizations take on collections, sign deeds of gift, and then the relationship ends. I think this is a huge misstep for any archival repository. By investing in communities – communities will invest in you. With each new generation comes new opportunities to promote equity and accountability throughout archival repositories. Each generation of archivists should be reflecting and reevaluating how stories are (and traditionally have been) collected, maintained, presented, and made (or not made) accessible. I cannot tell you how many times I have worked with patrons, students, and volunteers, who have expressed to me that they feel that they are not represented, they are not “seen” amongst the archival collections they are exploring. It truly breaks my heart, and it means that we, as archival professionals are falling short, and we need to do better and be better for ALL users. I feel that inclusivity is key to create a well-rounded narrative, where users/patrons/researchers/etc. can “see themselves” reflected in the archives and collections. It has been my experience that when someone feels invested in and has input to how they are being represented, there is a higher propensity for folks to champion for the survival and continuation of an archive. By getting community members and groups invested in telling their story, identifying themselves in their own way and own language/words, and by not leaving it up to the archivist to make assumptions, collections that are taken in become more authentic and personal. During this conference, I also reflected a lot on the right to be remembered and the right to be forgotten. Nobody owes anyone their story. It is so important for archivists (including myself) to remember that. Some stories are too painful for folks to share, some are not ready (and may never be), and some are Read More
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	DLF Forum Community Journalist Reflection: Jocelyn Hurtado
This post was written by Jocelyn Hurtado, who was selected to be one of this year’s virtual DLF Forum Community Journalists. Jocelyn Hurtado is a native Miamian who worked as an archivist at a community repository for four year. She is experienced in working with manuscript, art and artifact collections pertaining to a community of color whose history has often been overlooked. Ms. Hurtado, understands the responsibility and the significance of the work done by community archivists and has seen firsthand that this work not only affects the present-day community but that it will continue to have a deep-rooted impact on generations to come. Ms. Hurtado also has experience promoting collections through exhibits, presentations, instructional sessions, and other outreach activities which includes the development and execution of an informative historical web-series video podcast.  Ms. Hurtado earned her Associate Degree in Anthropology from Miami-Dade College and a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology from the University of Florida. She also completed the Georgia Archives Institute Program.  This year has been full of new experiences and we all have faced the challenges of adapting to the new professional realities of relying on technology to complete our work, promoting the goals of our organization all while staying connected with communities we serve virtually. Our phones and laptops are now on the top of the list of tools we cannot function without and it’s arguably just as valuable as a pencil or finding aid to an archivist, at least from my own personal experience. As a first-time attendee and a community journalist, I was excited and unsure of how the 2020 DLF Forum would operate on a virtual platform. Like millions around the world I’ve been working remotely for months and learned to adapt but I was still hesitant on how attendees would be able to truly connect to the panelist, fellow attendees and with the subject of each talk remotely. It is no secret that librarians, archivists, historians or anyone in a related field have a tendency to be introverted and from my own personal experience starting a conversation, connecting with others and networking can be stressful. However, I was quickly positively surprised on how easy it was to start a conversation at the conference. I enjoyed the Slack application in which attendees were able to share thoughts, ideas and pose questions about each session. I certainly viewed more opinions, concepts and panels virtually than I probably would have in person. I liked the fact that I could have access to the sessions anytime which is great for anyone who has a busy schedule as well as any problems accessing the videos due to the digital divide caused by finances or other factors such as remoteness or environmental factors such as hurricanes or storms. In the opening plenary I was delighted to hear the acknowledgement of the indigenous people and their lands in regards to the location of the original conference and area that was being discussed. The keynote speaker, Dr. Stacy Patton, was simply incredible and asked us to grapple with a very important question: Do Black Lives Matter in galleries, libraries, archives and museums? I believe we all know and can say historically the answer is no, black lives have systematically been erased and unwelcome in these spaces. 2020 has become the year of reckoning for some institutions and for many in this field that have been part of this problem. Thus, the question becomes what now? How can meaningful and genuine change come about? There is no one size fits all plan and up to in the field to do the work and realize there will never be a timeline or an exact moment where it will be marked as done. I had the opportunity to ask Dr. Patton a question and was also able to see other questions posed by fellow attendees. It created a hub for sharing experiences and problems encountered in our own institutions which was able to foster a connected moment and experience. Dr. Patton hit the nail on the head when reciting the Claude McKay poem, “If We Must Die.” It was a couple of days before Election Day and oh how the words aptly describe the current era and the rawness of it all. During her speech I reflected on the work of Schomberg and many other black intellectuals whose worked and made centers were black lives do matter and their stories were properly preserved. I also reflected on my experience working at a black community repository, in a space made for black lives to matter. I also recognize another important question: Which Black Lives Matter in these spaces? Women, individuals overlooked due to their sexual orientation, and those from a lower socioeconomic status or position have had their stories overlooked. There is so much work to be done and this has encouraged and highlighted the importance of pushing the boundaries and the sharing of ideas. The Recording Restorative Justice and Accountability: The Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive presented by Gina Nortonsmith, Raymond Wilkes, Amanda Rust and Drew Facklam was inspiring. The work done by the team of telling the stories of victims and giving a voice is imperative. Prior to this session I did not know of The Civil Rights and the Restorative Justice Project and was glad to learn about the research being conducted along with support policy initiatives on racial hate crimes during the Jim Crow Era and that justice is still being pursued for the victims and their families. The statement “I like to think of the investigator as the foundation for an archive, while the archivist is the architect and engineer, providing structure and organization in order to complete the building, i.e. the archive” by Raymond Wilkes beautifully explained the importance of the collaborative efforts and the relationship member of the team had to the task. I am looking forward to next year’s DLF Forum and hope/expect it to continue the focus on the community.
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	DLF Forum Community Journalist Reflection: Melde Rutledge
This post was written by Melde Rutledge (@MeldeRutledge), who was selected to be one of this year’s virtual DLF Forum Community Journalists. Melde Rutledge is the Digital Collections Librarian at Wake Forest University’s Z. Smith Reynolds Library. He is responsible for leading the library’s digitization services—primarily in support of ZSR’s Special Collections and Archives, as well as providing support for university departments.  He earned his MLIS from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and has served in librarianship for approximately 12 years. His background also includes 8 years of newspaper journalism, where he wrote news, sports, and feature articles for several locally published newspapers in North Carolina.  He currently lives in Winston-Salem, NC, with his wife and three sons. Since 2016, I’ve appreciated the opportunity to attend and participate in the annual DLF Forum. I look forward to the great takeaways to share with my colleagues back home. Let’s also not forget the wonderful venues where the Forum takes place (Las Vegas, Tampa, etc.). Needless to say, a global pandemic emerged this year, resulting in the 2020 DLF Forum to occur virtually.  As I reflect on this year’s installment of the DLF Forum, it’s difficult not to compare the Forum’s first virtual event with the previous in-person gatherings—particularly in regards to size. The fact that the 2020 event had more than 2,000 registered participants is a testament to the popularity and value of DLF. Being that it also surpassed the overall in-person attendance record (just over 800 people) of the 2017 DLF Forum in Pittsburgh is also noteworthy. The segment that I look forward to the most from the DLF Forums are the opening plenaries, because of its great keynote speakers. Stacey Patton provided an excellent talk highlighting the significance of preserving the black experience in galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAMs)—covering several cohesive themes during her one-hour-plus speech—including the COVID-19 pandemic, hiring diverse staff in GLAMs, America’s ongoing issue with racism, and the social and racial parallels of then and now.  One of my key takeaways of her talk is spotlighting the need for institutions to be “ready and equipped” during the pandemic to educate students. This was suggested to be accomplished by providing research materials remotely, but also asking, “What difference does this make that we’re digitizing things? How is this power to be used to protect documents when we may not know their importance? What about the digital divide and access to these materials?” These indeed are very important thoughts to me, as a key role of my work is providing digital access to materials tucked away within our special collections and archives. And it was great that presenters addressed Patton’s questions throughout the DLF sessions. “‘Can We Digitize This? Should We?’” Navigating Ethics, Law, and Policy in Bringing Collections to Digital Life” is a great example. This was presented by Stacy Reardon and Michael Lange from UC Berkeley Library. I was impressed with their Digital Lifecycle Program, and the ethical considerations embedded within their workflow. I have interest in seeing how institutions confront the issue regarding the digitization of materials of underprivileged groups, as well as how they approach the handling of culturally sensitive materials, accessibility, and appropriate metadata creation. As Julie Hardesty pointed out in her presentation entitled, “Mitigating Bias Through Controlled Vocabularies,” when working with metadata, you can become familiar with several widely used controlled vocabularies. However, working with large common vocabularies can “paint broad strokes that cover up more than they should, that generalize or simplify too much, and show the biases of dominant groups such as the white male viewpoint. Additionally, the process to change and update terms can be slow to keep up.” When I listen to presentations on this theme, speakers routinely note the value of incorporating community engagement. A nice example of this was shared during the presentation, “Curationist: Designing a Metadata Standard and Taxonomy for an Open Cultural Ecosystem.” Curationist.org is a site that finds and collects important cultural and historical resources that are within the public domain. As explained by presenter Sharon Mizota, community users will be able to include their own metadata to records on this site.  Overall, I salute all the organizers and presenters for producing an impressive 2020 DLF program. And kudos to the partnership between CLIR/DLF and the HBCU Library Alliance. As an HBCU graduate, I appreciate programming that covers how HBCUs approach digitization, and the stories behind the unique materials that are digitally preserved, especially amid the COVID-19 pandemic. COVID-19 is indeed a big factor in how many of us in this profession are conducting decision making. The wealth of relevant content in this year’s DLF was very timely in this regard.
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	DLF Forum Community Journalist Reflection: Amanda Guzman
This post was written by Amanda Guzman, who was selected to be one of this year’s virtual DLF Forum Community Journalists. Amanda Guzman is an anthropological archaeologist with a PhD in Anthropology (Archaeology) from the University of California, Berkeley. She specializes in the field of museum anthropology with a research focus on the history of collecting and exhibiting Puerto Rico at the intersection of issues of intercultural representation and national identity formation. She applies her collections experience as well as her commitment to working with and for multiple publics to her object-based inquiry teaching practice that privileges a more equitable, co-production of knowledge in the classroom through accessible engagement in cultural work. Amanda is currently the Ann Plato Post-Doctoral Fellow in Anthropology and American Studies at Trinity College in Hartford, CT.  On Belonging: There is that decisive moment for me at every academic conference that I’ve ever attended – whether it is one that I frequent regularly (even annually) or one that I’m trying out for the first time like the DLF Forum this year – where I’m sketching out my trajectory of movement and negotiating what my belonging might look like in the space. This moment exists in the scanning of the conference program and translating of different panel abstracts. This moment exists in those standstill seconds in the threshold of a panel room as you decide whether to enter or not, perhaps as you notice a familiar or friendly face.  Our current pandemic moment has transformed how we collectively gather in profound ways and brought into sharp relief the pre-existing structural social inequities of access. And yet, the decisive moment of my new belonging in the space of the DLF Forum was from a distance, and yet was not solitary beginning with a wave of introductions among first-time attendees and offers by long-time Forum-goers of support on Slack and extending to the generosity of time, experience, and transparency offered to me by my DLF mentor, Maggie McCready in our Zoom conversations. The decisive moment ultimately resolved, as I left the metaphorical door threshold to take a seat, during Dr. Stacy Patton’s keynote as she seamlessly moved between commentary on national news, archival text, pedagogical practice and her own powerful personal narrative of coming to belong in spaces not made for her experience and of coming to build new spaces of belonging.  Activating the Archive by Reframing History as Practice: One of the most compelling interventions that Dr. Patton articulated in her keynote speech was a call for the DLF community to reframe their implicit understanding of history not only as a physical archive of a material past but also as an active departure point for our contemporary reorientation and empowerment. Interweaving meaning and purpose across institutional case-studies, she referred to the concept of “historical touchstones” that present us with “context, guidance, and perspective” that have the analytical potential to ground our experience in the positionalities as a “keeper of knowledge” with a “traditional role of being…guide” to students.     Keepers of Knowledge: This proposal of mobilizing history towards how we critically approach our present-day practice in the field echoed throughout the subsequent forum presentations and was especially materialized for me in the citational acts of emphasizing a theoretical focus on an ethics of care. In the “Combo Session: Implementing responsible workflows and practices,” ethics of care was centered in an appreciation for “relationships with uneven power relations,” a methodological re-framing of both those actors who study and those communities who are studied as equal “independent rational subjects” and a researcher responsibility to identify the multi-faceted capacity of archival work to inflict harm. This work was discussed, for example, with the case-study of the archival process at the University of California, Berkeley for selecting indigenous cultural material for digitization and if to be digitized, under what terms of public access. In other words, professional ways of working were recast beyond the technicalities of how archival material may be best processed and digitally preserved to include and more importantly, to privilege a recognition of academic histories of community extraction and an opportunity for academic futures of more collaborative, equitable workflows.   Student Guides: Building on this important reflection on institutional practices, the US Latino DH panel entitled, “Recovering the Past, Creating the Future” brought the historically based practice conversation into the context of the undergraduate classroom. During their presentation, I was reminded of Dr. Patton’s earlier caution that digital work could not be the “end all be all” (even among undergraduates who are often thought to be “digital natives”) given how it is “alien to flow of time…nuances” and “abbreviates how we understand things”.  Presenters Carolina Villarroel, Gabriela Baeza Ventura, Lorena Gauthereau and Linda Garcia Merchant accepted the challenge and outlined a pedagogical design that built a student theoretical consciousness of the silences inherent in archival representations of the human experience and equipped students methodologically through programs like Omeka to emerge as digital storytellers of new stories. Moreover, the presenters destabilized the curatorial authority of collection-holding institutions by decolonizing where and how we locate archives with models such as post-custodial archives (describing archival management in which the community maintains physical custody of material records) and migrant archives. Both panels therefore expanded the boundaries of what constitutes archival practice – in terms of how we keep existing knowledge and how we teach knowledge production – by expanding what we care for to who we care with. At the Close:             Aliya Reich, Program Manager for Conferences and Events at the Digital Library Federation, remarked at the start of the forum that the goal of our gathering was “building community while apart”.  Joy Banks, Program Officer at the Council on Library and Information Resources, responded on Slack to a participant struggling with the digital conference platform that “there is no behind this year”.  Together, their words bring me – in concert with Dr. Patton’s keynote assertion of our roles as “guardians of the past and present” and “architects of Read More
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	DLF Forum Community Journalist Reflection: Shelly Black
This post was written by Shelly Black (@ShellyYBlack), who was selected to be one of this year’s virtual DLF Forum Community Journalists. Shelly Black is the Cyma Rubin Library Fellow at North Carolina State University Libraries where she supports digital preservation in the Special Collections Research Center. She also works on a strategic project involving immersive technology spaces and digital scholarship workflows. Previously she was a marketing specialist at the University of Arizona Libraries and promoted library services and programs through social media, news stories, and newsletters. Shelly was recently selected as a 2020 Emerging Leader by the American Library Association and is a provisional member of the Academy of Certified Archivists. She received a MLIS and a Certificate in Archival Studies from the University of Arizona where she was a Knowledge River scholar. She also holds a BFA in photography and minor in Japanese from the UA. The weekend protests began in response to George Floyd’s murder, I was driving across the country for my first post-MLIS job. I listened to the radio, scrolled through the news and felt the country in pain. Reflecting on how volatile 2020 has been, I’m grateful that the DLF Forum was freely open to all and held online. As a graduate student, my exposure to digital curation and preservation focused on theory more than practice. So I was eager to learn about current strategies and tools. Considering the anti-racist commitments made recently by numerous organizations, I also looked forward to hearing about projects to improve discoverability of marginalized people in the historical record. Many sessions covered computational methods used by librarians, archivists, and researchers to improve our understanding of, and increase access to, digitized materials. Juan Manuel García Fernández and Nickoal Eichmann-Kalwara presented on “Digital El Diario and Archival Justice in the Digital Humanities Graduate Classroom.” Their work involved creating a corpus from a digitized 1970s Chicanx newspaper and showing students how to use text analysis tools, such as MALLET and Voyant, for the purpose of historical recovery. In “Images as Data with Computer Vision,” Carol Chiodo shared that Harvard University Library is using a Python package to analyze and provide descriptive metadata at scale for photographic collections. This includes protest photography, so the project will also result in the creation of ethical guidelines for applying automation to sensitive materials. Throughout the Forum, a theme that resonated with me was the ethics of care. I learned how multiple presenters have adopted this feminist approach that emphasizes relationships and considers power imbalances. During “Can We Digitize This? Should We? Navigating Ethics, Law, and Policy in Bringing Collections to Digital Life,” Stacy Reardon explained that she adopts an ethics of care when deciding whether to make materials available online. She noted how this framework urges us to consider the potential for harm not just to individuals but also communities. Lorena Gauthereau, one of the panel members of “US Latino DH: Recovering the Past, Creating the Future,” imparted that community outreach should be approached with an ethics of care. She said we have a responsibility to make the people represented in archives feel valued, which can be achieved through post-custodial methods, consent, decolonial spaces, and trusting relationships. As a Mexican Japanese American, increasing representation and reclaiming the humanity of historically oppressed people has personal significance. I wholeheartedly agree with Gauthereau who expressed:  “By recovering the past, we can project toward our future. While working with recovered archives, we make space for healing by making visible not only painful histories, but also resistance, survival and joy, to acknowledge where we come from and where we are going.”  These presentations reminded me to think critically about the interplay between people, archival collections, and technology. While I see promise in the application of computational methods for understanding and expanding access to stories beyond the dominant narrative, I’m also wary of the challenges. Algorithms used for facial recognition, screening job applicants, and identifying high-risk patients continue to oppress communities of color. Mixed race people like myself don’t fall neatly into metadata categories and likely aren’t seen by algorithms applied to textual or visual corpora. Meanwhile, libraries have started using machine learning for appraisal, description, and other laborious tasks. Many collections await being described—or re-described using anti-oppressive language—and made available online. Algorithms offer efficiency, but when people create them with training data which centers whiteness, they further harm communities.  Another challenge is the layering of biases when working with digitized collections. We lose more than visual details and aesthetic qualities through reproductive technologies and migration of formats. There are racial consequences. We scan photographs made from color film stocks originally calibrated for light skin. Art historian Lyneise Williams has also called attention to the erasure of Black people through the high contrast process of microfilming. So what happens when we use biased machine learning models to process images that inherit white normativity?  Growing digitized collections make the adoption of machine learning compelling. At the same time, an ethics of care and diverse voices are needed when new tools are being designed. Knowledge produced from analyzing collections at scale will only be as inclusive as the human beings who designed the algorithms and the digitized material’s source medium. As Stacey Patton reminded us in her keynote, digitization isn’t a be-all and end-all, particularly when there is still the digital divide. The DLF Forum inspired me to think about the opportunities and issues ahead. I hope to attend future Forums where discussions on using technology in ways which uplift communities of color continue.
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	DLF Forum Community Journalist Reflection: Hsiu-Ann Tom
This post was written by Hsiu-Ann Tom, who was selected to be one of this year’s virtual DLF Forum Community Journalists. Hsiu-Ann is the Digital Archivist at The Amistad Research Center in New Orleans, LA where her work focuses on born digital collection development. She received her Masters in Library and Information Science with a concentration in Archives Management from Simmons University in Boston in 2019. She is a graduate of Columbia University (BA, Sociology) and Harvard University (MA, Religion and Politics), and is a member of the Academy of Certified Archivists. Prior to working in the archival field, Hsiu-Ann served in the United States Army intelligence field as a cryptolinguistic analyst, attending the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California. Before coming to Amistad, Hsiu-Ann worked on the archives staff of Boston University’s Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center working with the Military Historical Society of Massachusetts Collection. She recently obtained the Society of American Archivist Digital Archivist Specialist certification and enjoys supporting students and new professionals in their educational development through her work as a member of SAA’s Graduate Archival Education Committee.   I am thankful for the opportunity to have helped cover this year’s conference as one of 12 Community Journalists. Given all of the challenges of 2020, I was looking forward to hearing how my colleagues were finding ways to navigate unfamiliar situations and overcome obstacles. As a new graduate in my first full-time position out of library school, it was both inspiring and encouraging to listen to so many in the field describe their innovations over the course of the conference. I am thankful to the conference organizers and attendees for assembling such a rich program for everybody to enjoy. As I gathered my thoughts about what to write, I was overwhelmed by the achievements and innovations of the DLF community. Each session was packed with more information than I could absorb and it was a joy to hear such dedicated professionals talk about their work. Yet, when I thought about the conference experience, what stuck out to me the most was the conference design itself and its alignment with DLF’s mission and values. I considered the introductory comments of Charles Henry and the DLF mission: DLF: advancing research, learning, social justice, & the public good through the creative design & wise application of digital library technology The conference felt like a model for how to implement these community values. It was exciting to see ideas in action and to feel like I was included in that as a newcomer to this group. From before the start of the conference, I appreciated the efforts of conference staff to make conference content accessible to attendees of all abilities. In light of the pandemic and the turn to online communication platforms, transcription and closed captioning services for the hearing impaired are sometimes overlooked by conference organizers. As a US Army veteran with hearing impairment who does not read lips, this was something I struggled with on my own until this year when online meetings meant I had to start asking for more accommodations. This is not always a comfortable or easy thing for anyone to do despite how accepting society says we are to helping those who need accommodations. DLF conference staff began reaching out by email prior to the conference to address these concerns and confirm the availability of captioning and transcription services for all sessions – something that has not been my experience at other conferences. On the first day of the conference when I could not understand how to make the captioning features work, DLF had staff on hand via Zoom link to jump on a screen share to show me how things worked on the Aviary platform in real time. They emailed me links to sessions I missed, coached me through the features as I tested the captioning, showed me how transcriptions worked and even where I could have emailed transcripts of the conference sessions and slide notes to access at a later time. Normally I would have to stop videos and play them back multiple times to get content for note taking. Personally, these tools meant participating in the conference with fewer distractions and less stress. As the conference progressed, I thought more about the importance of these tools for our user community and how we can employ them to improve their experiences. Dr. Stacey Patton’s words during her opening address stayed with me throughout the conference as I considered the topic of accessibility in my daily work. She asked attendees to consider our role as archivists. As a new archivist trying to develop policies, procedures and workflows that encourage access and use for those coming to my archive, how can I perform my work more inclusively? Are there communities being overlooked? What needs are going unmet and how do I address them? Current discussions and work around accessibility are critical to ensuring that all patrons have access to the work we perform. The DLF Forum was a great experience for me in that I was able to learn about new tools to help with accessibility like Otter.ai and how to use it. I also learned about adjusting on the fly, accepting that sometimes technology will malfunction even with the best laid plans, having a backup plan to back up your plan is a great plan and finally, asking your community of peers for help may be your best plan. I am fortunate to have been able to attend DLF this year and to see the hard work of so many colleagues on display, learn new skills and connect with a community of professionals working in my field. There are many ways organizations demonstrate to their community of users “You are welcome here. We want you here and you are part of this community.” These simple steps taken by the DLF conference team through the accessibility tools helped me to feel part of the community this year. Thank you to staff who provided assistance with Read More
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	Announcing a Portuguese Translation of the 2019 Levels of Digital Preservation Matrix 
Portuguese Translations of the 2019 Levels of Digital Preservation Matrix  The NDSA is pleased to announce that Version 2 (2019) of the Levels Matrix has been translated into Portuguese by Laura Vilela R. Rezende. This document enriches the scientific studies on Digital Preservation and Research Data Curation developed by the Brazilian research group of which the researcher is part: The Research Network – DRIADE: Digital Preservation Studies and Practices   Links to these documents are found below as well as on the 2019 Levels of Digital Preservation OSF project page: https://osf.io/qgz98/ V2.0 (2019)  If you would be interested in translating the Levels of Digital Preservation V2.0 into another language please contact us at ndsa.digipres@gmail.com.    Tradução para o Português da Matriz dos Níveis de Preservação Digital de 2019  A NDSA tem o prazer de anunciar que a versão 2.0 (2019) da Matriz dos Níveis de Preservação Digital foi traduzida para o Português por Laura Vilela R. Rezende. Este documento enriquece os estudos científicos sobre Preservação Digital e Curadoria de Dados de Pesquisa desenvolvidos pelo grupo de pesquisa brasileiro do qual a pesquisadora faz parte:  Rede de Pesquisa DRIADE – Estudos e práticas de Preservação Digital  A seguir os links para acesso a este documentos. É possível acessar também pela página do projeto OSF: https://osf.io/qgz98/ V2.0 (2019)   Caso tenha interesse em traduzir os Níveis de Preservação Digital V 2.0 em outro idioma, por favor entre em contato conosco pelo e-mail: ndsa.digipres@gmail.com  
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	10 Additions to NDSA Membership in Summer and Fall 2020
Since the spring of 2020, the NDSA Leadership unanimously voted to welcome 10 new members. Each of these new members brings a host of skills and experience to our group. Please help us welcome: Arizona State University Library: With many of their materials from local Indigenous and LatinX communities, the Library is working with researchers from these communities to archive and preserve collections and artifacts unique to our region, making them accessible for generations to come. Arkevist: A civil society that specializes in historical and genealogical research discoverygarden: For more than a decade, discoverygarden has been building trusted repositories and digital asset management systems for organizations around the world. Global Connexions: For two decades Federick Zarndt has provided consulting services to cultural heritage organizations and has contributed to NDSA, ALA, IFLA and ALTO. LYRASIS: They are the non-profit organizational home of several open source projects that are focused on collecting, organizing, and ensuring long-term access to digital content including DSpace, ArchivesSpace, CollectionSpace, Islandora, Fedora Repository, and DuraCloud.  Michigan Digital Preservation Network: MDPN is an IMLS-grant funded initiative to build a member-run statewide distributed digital preservation network with members ranging from libraries, archives, museums, and historical societies with the primary purpose of preserving cultural heritage materials Robert L. Bogomolny Library – University of Baltimore: Robert L. Bogomolny Library is in the midst of a five year digital preservation implementation based upon results derived from conducting Institutional Readiness and Digital Preservation Capability Maturity Model exercises. Their Special Collections and Archives hold sizable digital collection materials, including 700TBs of digitized local TV news. University of Pennsylvania Libraries: The Penn Libraries are working on many digital preservation activities, including but not limited to the ongoing development of a Samvera repository, web archiving initiatives, conducting a pilot of two preservation storage systems, and developing governance for workflows and policies in order to have robust and programmatic digital preservation practices. University of Victoria Libraries: The UVic Libraries are currently involved in a number of digital preservation-related infrastructure projects, including Council of Prairie and Pacific University Libraries (COPPUL) Archivematica-as-a-Service and WestVault (a LOCKSS-based preservation storage network), and serve as infrastructure hosts for the Canadian Government Information Preservation Network (CGI-PN), the Public Knowledge Project Preservation Network (PKP-PN), and perma.cc.  University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee: Over the past five years UWM has formed a Digital Preservation Community of Practice whose aim is to identify common digital preservation issues across departments and shared tools and workflows.  UWM also co-founded the Digital Preservation Expertise Group (DPEG), a University of Wisconsin System-wide group that shares digital preservation expertise, develops training, and investigates shared resources across all thirteen UW System Libraries. Each organization has participants in one or more of the various NDSA interest and working groups – so keep an eye out for them on your calls and be sure to give them a shout out. Please join me in welcoming our new members. To review our list of members, you can see them here. ~ Dan Noonan, Vice Chair of the Coordinating Committee
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	Announcing Spanish Translations for the 2019 and 2013 Levels Matrix
The NDSA is pleased to announce that both the original (2013) and Version 2 (2019) of the Levels Matrix  have been translated into Spanish by our colleagues from Mexico and Spain, Dr. David Leija (Universidad Autónoma de Tamaulipas) and Dr. Miquel Térmens (Universitat de Barcelona). Drs. Leija and Térmens are academic researchers and founders of APREDIG (Ibero-American association for digital preservation), a non-profit organization focused on spreading the importance of good practices of digital preservation for the spanish-speaking community. Links to these documents are found below as well as on the Levels of Digital Preservation OSF project pages: 2019 (https://osf.io/qgz98/) and 2013 (https://osf.io/9ya8c/) as well as below. V1.0 (2013) https://osf.io/wpdn9 | http://www.apredig.org/npdndsa2013/ V2.0 (2019)  https://osf.io/egjk8 | http://www.apredig.org/npdndsa2019/ In addition, Miquel Térmens and David Leija have written a report analyzing and documenting the use of the NDSA Levels in 8 public and private organizations in Spain, Mexico, Brazil and Switzerland.  The Methodology of digital preservation audits with NDSA Levels, can be found in Spanish here and should be cited as found below.   Térmens, Miquel; Leija, David (2017). “Methodology of digital preservation audits with NDSA Levels”. El profesional de la información, v. 26, n. 3, pp. 447-456. https://doi.org/10.3145/epi.2017.may.11 | https://fima.ub.edu/pub/termens/docs/EPI-v26n3.pdf  If you would be interested in translating the Levels of Digital Preservation V2.0 into another language please contact us at ndsa.digipres@gmail.com.    Traducciones al español de la Matriz de Niveles de Preservación Digital 2019 y 2013 La NDSA se complace en anunciar que tanto la versión original como la versión 2 de la Matriz de Niveles de Preservación Digital han sido traducidas al español por nuestros colegas investigadores de México y España, el Dr. David Leija (Universidad Autónoma de Tamaulipas) y el Dr. Miquel Térmens (Universitat de Barcelona). Térmens y Leija son investigadores académicos fundadores de APREDIG (Asociación Iberoamericana de Preservación Digital), una organización sin ánimo de lucro enfocada en difundir la importancia de las buenas prácticas de preservación digital para la comunidad hispanohablante. Los enlaces a estos documentos traducidos se encuentran a continuación, así como en las páginas del proyecto OSF de Niveles de Preservación Digital: 2019 ((https://osf.io/qgz98/) y 2013 (https://osf.io/9ya8c/). V1.0 (2013) https://osf.io/wpdn9 | http://www.apredig.org/npdndsa2013/ V2.0 (2019)  https://osf.io/egjk8 | http://www.apredig.org/npdndsa2019/ Adicionalmente, Miquel Térmens y David Leija han escrito un reporte analizando y documentando el uso de los niveles NDSA en 8 organizaciones públicas y privadas de España, México, Brasil y Suiza. La Auditoría de Preservación Digital con NDSA Levels, se puede encontrar en español aquí y debe citarse como se encuentra a continuación.   Térmens, Miquel; Leija, David (2017). “Auditoría de Preservación Digital con NDSA Levels”. El profesional de la información, v. 26, n. 3, pp. 447-456.      https://doi.org/10.3145/epi.2017.may.11 | https://fima.ub.edu/pub/termens/docs/EPI-v26n3.pdf  Si está interesado en traducir los niveles de Preservación Digital V2.0 en otros idiomas por favor póngase en contacto en ndsa.digipres@gmail.com.   
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	NDSA Announces Winners of 2020 Innovation Awards
The NDSA established its Innovation Awards in 2012 to recognize and encourage innovation in the field of digital stewardship.  Since then, it has honored 39 exemplary educators, future stewards, individuals, institutions, and projects for their efforts in ensuring the ongoing viability and accessibility of our valuable digital heritage. The 2020 NDSA Innovation Awards are generously sponsored by Digital Bedrock. Today, NDSA adds 8 new awardees to that honor roll during the opening plenary ceremony of the 2020 NDSA Digital Preservation Conference.   These winners were selected from the largest pool of nominees so far in the Awards’ history: 32 nominations of 30 nominees.  While the pool size made the judging more difficult, the greater breadth, depth, and quality of the nominations is a positive sign for the preservation community, as it is indicative of the growing maturity and robustness of the field.  This year’s awardees continue to reflect a recent trend towards an increasingly international perspective and recognition of the innovative contributions by and for historically underrepresented and marginalized communities.  Please help us congratulate these awardees!  We encourage you to follow-up in learning more about their activities and the ways in which they have had a profound beneficial impact on our collective ability to protect and make accessible our valuable digital heritage. Educators are recognized for innovative approaches and access to digital preservation through academic programs, partnerships, professional development opportunities, and curriculum development.  This year’s awardees in the Educators category are: Library Juice Academy Certificate in Digital Curation.  This program, launched in 2019, encompasses a six-course sequence for library, archives and museum practitioners wanting to learn more about and expand their skill sets for curating and maintaining unique digital assets. The curriculum offers comprehensive coverage of collection development and appraisal, description, rights and access, digital preservation, and professional ethics and responsible stewardship.  The program’s affordability, flexible scheduling, and online pedagogy encouraging engaged collaborative learning provides a unique opportunity for professional development and continuing education.  In particular, the emphasis placed on ethics and sustainability provides an appropriate counterpoint to other more technically-focused topics, drawing needed attention to critical issues of policy, finance, equity, and diversity. International Council on Archive (ICA) Africa Programme Digital Records Curation Programme.  The Programme supports the professional development of new generations of digital archivists and records managers in Africa, a geographic and cultural region historically marginalized and underrepresented in international digital stewardship discourse, practice, and education. The Programme’s volunteer-taught study school uses open access readings and open source tools to minimize technical resource and financial impediments to participation, and to encourage creative repurposing of pedagogic materials in the participants’ local contexts.  The Programme also provides financial support for early-career practitioners and educators across the African continent to attend and learn, share their own teaching techniques and insights, and to build a professional research and teaching network.  Parallel instructional opportunities are offered for Anglophone and Francophone participants.  With a focus on “training the trainers”, the Digital Records Curation Programme promotes the development of maturing cohorts of stewardship practitioners and the growing professionalism of digital preservation activities focused on long-term stewardship of Africa’s vital digital heritage.   Future Stewards are recognized as students and early-career professionals or academics taking a creative approach to advancing knowledge of digital preservation issues and practices.  These year’s awardees in the Future Stewards category are: Sawood Alam.   A PhD candidate at Old Dominion University, Sawood has been an active participant in the digital preservation community via the International Internet Preservation Consortium, the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, and other communities for years, presenting and reporting on the complex topics, like holdings of web archives, decentralized systems, archival fixity, web packaging, and more. As a developer and systems architect, Sawood is a strong advocate for open-source and open-access tools, and has offered courses and lectures on various programming languages like Linux, Python, Ruby on Rails, and more. A mentor to new graduate students and researchers, Sawood will join the Internet Archive after graduation, leveraging his engineering experience and his academic experience to perform outreach to research groups interested in making use of the Wayback Machine’s holdings.     Carolina Quezada Meneses.  As an intern, Carolina worked on a variety of projects that ranged from exploring new tools and software that help preserve, manage, and provide access to born-digital material, and helped develop a remote processing workflow that enabled University of California, Irvine (UCI) staff to work on the organization’s digital backlog while working from home during the Coronavirus pandemic.  However, it is Meneses’s work with the Christine Tamblyn papers — which included numerous Macintosh-formatted floppy disks and CD-ROMs — that deserves additional praise: faced with ample technical challenges to providing access, Quezada created disk images of the floppy disks and CD-ROMs with specialized hardware, found a compatible emulator, and created screencast videos of the artwork, making the content accessible to a broader audience than traditional on-site access would typically allow.  Thanks to Meneses’s innovative thinking, a collection that had no prior level of access for 22 years is now accessible to researchers, and remains an example of her lasting dedication to providing access to born-digital formats.   Organizations are recognized for innovative approaches to providing support and guidance to the digital preservation community.  This year’s awardee in the Organizations category is: National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).  NARA has a notable history of providing records management guidance focusing on digital preservation and addressing key factors to the successful permanent preservation of digital content. This year, the panel is pleased to distinguish NARA’s Digital Preservation Framework. Created after an extensive environmental scan of community digital preservation risk assessment and planning resources, this project recognizes that successful digital preservation requires both understanding the risks posed by file formats and identifying or developing processes for mitigating these risks. In response to this, the Framework provides extensive risk and planning analysis for over 500 formats in 16 type categories. The Framework can be applied across the lifecycle of digital content and is designed to enable a low-barrier Read More
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	Award Winners: NDSA Levels of Digital Preservation Group
This year’s World Digital Preservation Day (#WDPD) was the biggest yet! With outpourings of research, achievements, practical advice, and fun it was hard to believe that there were also awards as part of that process. On 05 November, the NDSA’s Levels of Digital Preservation Reboot was the recipient of one of the Digital Preservation Coalition’s Digital Preservation Award! We won in the ICA-sponsored category for Collaboration and Cooperation – the first time it has been awarded!  This honor is collectively bestowed on the many of you who helped craft and refine the Levels and we hope your continued ideas, and enthusiasm will keep the momentum going. Thank you for all your hard work! For an overview, background, and charge for the Levels, see my blog post that speaks to leveraging such a high level of collaborative energy. ~ Bradley Daigle, Levels of Digital Preservation Steering Group Lead
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	Meet the 2020 DLF Forum Community Journalists
The 2020 Virtual DLF Forum looks different from our typical event in almost every way imaginable. Due to the fact that we aren’t convening in person and registration is free, we decided to offer a different kind of fellowship opportunity. Because the guiding purpose of this year’s Virtual DLF Forum is building community while apart, through our re-envisioned fellowship program, we are highlighting new voices from “community journalists” in the field. We are providing $250 stipends to a cohort of 10 Virtual DLF Forum attendees from a variety of backgrounds and will feature their voices and experiences on the DLF blog after our events this fall. We are excited to announce this year’s DLF Forum Community Journalists: Arabeth Balasko Arabeth Balasko (she/her) is an archivist and historian dedicated to public service and proactive stewardship. As a professional archivist, her overarching goals are to curate collections that follow a shared standardization practice, are user-centric, and are searchable and accessible to all via physical and digital platforms. She believes that an archive should be a welcoming place for all people and should be an inclusive environment which advocates to collect, preserve, and make accessible the stories and histories of diverse voices. By getting individuals involved in telling THEIR story and making THEIR history part of the ever-growing story of humanity, we all win!   Rebecca Bayeck @rybayeck Rebecca Y. Bayeck is a dual-PhD holder in Learning Design & Technology and Comparative & International Education from the Pennsylvania State University. Currently a CLIR postdoctoral fellow at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture where she engages in digital research, data curation, and inclusive design. Her interdisciplinary research is at the interface of several fields including the learning sciences, literacy studies, and game studies. At this intersection, she explores literacies and learning in games, particularly board games, the interaction of culture, space, and context on design, learning, research, literacies.    Shelly Black @ShellyYBlack Shelly Black is the Cyma Rubin Library Fellow at North Carolina State University Libraries where she supports digital preservation in the Special Collections Research Center. She also works on a strategic project involving immersive technology spaces and digital scholarship workflows. Previously she was a marketing specialist at the University of Arizona Libraries and promoted library services and programs through social media, news stories, and newsletters. Shelly was recently selected as a 2020 Emerging Leader by the American Library Association and is a provisional member of the Academy of Certified Archivists. She received a MLIS and a Certificate in Archival Studies from the University of Arizona where she was a Knowledge River scholar. She also holds a BFA in photography and minor in Japanese from the UA.   Lisa Covington @prof_cov Lisa Covington, MA is a PhD Candidate at The University of Iowa studying Sociology of Education, Digital Humanities and African American Studies. Her dissertation work is “Mediating Black Girlhood: A Multi-level Comparative Analysis of Narrative Feature Films.” This research identifies mechanisms in which media operates as an institution, (mis)informing individual and social ontological knowledge.   In 2020, Lisa received the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Award from the Iowa Department of Human Rights. She is the Director of the Ethnic Studies Leadership Academy in Iowa City, an educational leadership program for Black youth, in middle school and high school, to learn African American advocacy through incorporating digital humanities and social sciences.    Lisa received her MA from San Diego State University in Women & Gender Studies. As a youth development professional, Lisa develops curriculum for weekly programming with girls of color, trains teachers on best practices for working with underrepresented youth, and directs programs in preschool through college settings in California, Pennsylvania, Iowa, New Jersey, New York and Washington, D.C.    Ana Hilda Figueroa de Jesús Ana Hilda Figueroa de Jesús will be graduating next spring from the Universidad de Puerto Rico in Río Piedras with a BA in History of Art. Her research interest focuses on education, accessibility and publicity of minority, revolutionary Puerto Rican art including topics such as race, gender and transnationalism. She has interned at Visión Doble: Journal of Criticism and History of Art, and volunteered at MECA International Art Fair 2019 and Instituto Nueva Escuela. Ana works as assistant for the curator and director of the Museum of History, Anthropology and Art at UPR. She is currently a Katzenberger Art History Intern at Smithsonian Libraries.   Amanda Guzman Amanda Guzman is an anthropological archaeologist with a PhD in Anthropology (Archaeology) from the University of California, Berkeley. She specializes in the field of museum anthropology with a research focus on the history of collecting and exhibiting Puerto Rico at the intersection of issues of intercultural representation and national identity formation. She applies her collections experience as well as her commitment to working with and for multiple publics to her object-based inquiry teaching practice that privileges a more equitable, co-production of knowledge in the classroom through accessible engagement in cultural work. Amanda is currently the Ann Plato Post-Doctoral Fellow in Anthropology and American Studies at Trinity College in Hartford, CT.    Carolina Hernandez @carolina_hrndz Carolina Hernandez is currently an Instruction Librarian at the University of Houston where she collaborates on creating inclusive learning environments for students. Previously, she was the Journalism Librarian at the University of Oregon, where she co-managed the Oregon Digital Newspaper Program. Her MLIS is from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her current research interests are in critical information literacy, inclusive pedagogy, and most recently, the intersection of digital collections and pedagogy.    Jocelyn Hurtado Jocelyn Hurtado is a native Miamian who worked as an Archivist at a community repository for four year. She is experienced in working with manuscript, art and artifact collections pertaining to a community of color whose history has often been overlooked. Ms. Hurtado, understands the responsibility and the significance of the work done by community archivists and has seen firsthand that this work not only affects the present-day community but that it will continue to have a deep-rooted impact on generations Read More
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	2020 DLF Forum: Building Community With DLF’s Digital Library Pedagogy Working Group
Though DLF is best known for our signature event, the annual DLF Forum, our working groups collaborate year round. Long before COVID-19 introduced the concept of “Zoom fatigue” into our lives, DLF’s working groups organized across institutional and geographical boundaries, building community while apart, to get work done. Made possible through the support of our institutional members, working groups are the efforts of a committed community of practitioners, using DLF as a framework for action, engaged in problem-solving in a variety of digital library subfields from project management and assessment to labor and accessibility. Once we decided that the 2020 DLF Forum and affiliated events would be held in a virtual format, it meant that our working groups wouldn’t have the opportunity to meet in person for their typical working meals that take place throughout the Forum; however, this year’s virtual format means that we’ll have more new DLF Forum attendees than ever before. Because DLF’s working groups are open to ALL, regardless of whether you’re affiliated with a DLF member institution or not, we asked leaders of the DLF working groups to introduce their groups and the work they do to the new and returning members of the #DLFvillage in a series of blogs and videos. We’ll share these working group updates in the days leading to this year’s DLF Forum. Who are we? The DLF Digital Library Pedagogy Working Group, commonly referred to as #DLFteach (also our Twitter hashtag), was founded in 2015 and is focused on building a community of practice for those interested in using digital library collections and technology in the classroom. The group is open for anyone to join regardless of your position, academic discipline, or DLF institutional affiliation. Here is what #DLFteach does and the ways you can join us: Twitter Chats One of the best ways to get involved with #DLFteach is to participate in a Twitter chat. Our Twitter chats offer a chance to chat with colleagues from all over on different subjects each chat. Every chat has a host or two who plan the topic and write questions that will be tweeted at intervals over the course of one hour. Participants can follow the questions tweeted from the @CLIRDLF handle and respond from their own Twitter account. Hosts will monitor the chat and also tweet frequently. To see all the tweets as they happen, the hashtag #DLFteach is included with every tweet, and participants should likewise add it to their tweets. People can participate as much or as little as possible, ranging from lurking to tweeting answers and replying to others’ tweets.  Twitter chats usually take place at 2-3 PM EST / 11 AM – noon PST on the third Tuesday of every other month. Once or twice a year, the chat will take place at another time for those who cannot make the regular time. You can see previous chats on the group’s wiki. Interested in hosting a chat? Want to suggest a topic? Get in touch with the outreach coordinators of the DLF Digital Library Pedagogy Group! Past Projects #DLFteach is a uniquely project-based working group, and we are usually working on a couple of projects at any given time of year. Typically, members propose or are made aware of projects that would benefit from the expertise and dedication of group members working to implement them. If you are interested in our group’s focus and are looking to get involved, you are welcome to propose a project. If you do not have a specific project in mind but still want to get involved, that’s great, too, since these projects offer many opportunities to contribute to the community and the profession. You may be wondering: What projects does #DLFteach work on? In September 2019, we released #DLFteach Toolkit 1.0, an openly available, peer reviewed collection of lesson plans and concrete instructional strategies edited by Erin Pappas and Liz Rodrigues and featuring the work of many #DLFteach members and affiliates. Check it out to get ideas of how to incorporate digital library collections and technologies into the classroom in structured, reproducible ways. Another 2019 resource developed by #DLFteach is the Teaching with Digital Primary Sources white paper, by Brianna Gormly, Maura Seale, Hannah Alpert-Abrams, Andi Gustavson, Angie Kemp, Thea Lindquist, and Alexis Logsdon, which outlines literacies and considers issues associated with finding, evaluating, and citing digital primary resources. If you are considering using digital primary sources in the classroom, this is an excellent resource to accompany your work with these materials. Additionally, #DLFteach has developed and facilitated workshops at the DLF Forum and Learn@DLF pre-conferences in 2016, 2018, and 2019. Current Projects Following the success of the first version released last year, we have issued a call for participation for the #DLFteach Toolkit 2.0, which will focus on instructional strategies using immersive technology. We are looking for both contributors and volunteers to assist with reviewing submissions and producing the Toolkit. Additionally, we are currently working on two blog series! One is focused on ethical issues for multimodal scholarship and pedagogy, and the other, Practitioner Perspectives: Developing, Adapting, and Contextualizing the #DLFteach Toolkit, is collecting interviews from practitioners (via Google Form) who have used or adapted #DLFteach Toolkit lesson plans. Look for these to be published in the coming months as well as calls to participate. How can you get involved? Anyone is welcome to join and participate in the Digital Library Pedagogy group and help grow the community of practitioners around teaching with digital library collections and tools. Our next Twitter chat will be on December 15 at 2:00 pm EST and will be focused on ways #DLFteach can help build community and support each other with the projects and ongoing initiatives we work on. Have you used or adapted lesson plans from the #DLFteach Toolkit 1.0? add your voice to Practitioner Perspectives: Developing, Adapting, and Contextualizing the #DLFteach Toolkit, a forthcoming blog series! Just answer our questions on this Google Form. Additionally, please consider joining our Google group and Read More
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	Louisa Kwasigroch Appointed Interim DLF Senior Program Officer
The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) is pleased to announce the appointment of Louisa Kwasigroch as interim Digital Library Federation (DLF) senior program officer. Kwasigroch, who currently serves as CLIR’s director of outreach and engagement and has worked extensively with the DLF community, will serve as the primary point of contact for DLF member institutions and individuals until a permanent senior program officer has been appointed. During the interim period, she will also continue to serve as director of outreach and engagement.   “I’m delighted Louisa has accepted this interim appointment,” said CLIR president Charles Henry. “With her knowledge of DLF’s engaged and active community, she will bring an empathetic and insightful continuity that will position us strategically for the next phase of DLF’s evolution.”  Kwasigroch has been in the library field for more than 15 years, working with public, museum, and academic libraries. She has her BA in photography from Columbia College Chicago, and both an MSLIS and MBA from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She began her career with CLIR in 2013 as a DLF program associate and was promoted to director of development and outreach in 2015 and director of outreach and engagement in 2020. “It has been a great joy to serve the DLF community these past seven years in my roles at CLIR,” said Kwasigroch. “I look forward to continuing to support our members, working groups, and constituents while collaborating even more closely with CLIR and DLF staff, who have been doing an amazing job moving things forward.” CLIR will resume its search for a permanent senior program officer in January 2021.
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	2020 DLF Forum: Building Community With DLF’s Data and Digital Scholarship Working Group
Though DLF is best known for our signature event, the annual DLF Forum, our working groups collaborate year round. Long before COVID-19 introduced the concept of “Zoom fatigue” into our lives, DLF’s working groups organized across institutional and geographical boundaries, building community while apart, to get work done. Made possible through the support of our institutional members, working groups are the efforts of a committed community of practitioners, using DLF as a framework for action, engaged in problem-solving in a variety of digital library subfields from project management and assessment to labor and accessibility. Once we decided that the 2020 DLF Forum and affiliated events would be held in a virtual format, it meant that our working groups wouldn’t have the opportunity to meet in person for their typical working meals that take place throughout the Forum; however, this year’s virtual format means that we’ll have more new DLF Forum attendees than ever before. Because DLF’s working groups are open to ALL, regardless of whether you’re affiliated with a DLF member institution or not, we asked leaders of the DLF working groups to introduce their groups and the work they do to the new and returning members of the #DLFvillage in a series of blogs and videos. We’ll share these working group updates in the days leading to this year’s DLF Forum.  What is the DLF Digital Scholarship and Data Services Working Group? The DLF Data and Digital Scholarship Working Group (DLFdds) is a continuation of two DLF groups: The eResearch Network and the Digital Scholarship Working Group. The current version of the group uses a mutual aid model to offer peer leaders and the group the ability to create topics of interest for the community. It is an evolution of the eResearch Network that DLF ran for many years.  Sara Mannheimer, Data Librarian, Montana State University and Jason Clark, Lead for Research Informatics, Montana State University will be facilitating the working group this year. Our charge notes that we are “a community of practice focused on implementing research data and digital scholarship services. The group focuses on shared skill development, peer mentorship, networking, and collaboration. DLFdds aims to create a self-reliant, mutually supportive community: a network of institutions and individuals engaged in continuous learning about research data management, digital scholarship, and research support.” Learn more about us: Our Digital Scholarship and Data Services Wiki Our Digital Scholarship and Data Services Google Group (listserv) What are we working on? We meet quarterly for discussion and activities based on DLF DDS community interest and ideas. Past topics have included: Advocacy and Promotion of Data Services and Digital Scholarship, Data Discovery/Metadata and Reusability, Collections as Data, Assessment (Metrics for success with Data Services and Digital Scholarship), etc. Last month, we met to talk about roadmapping in a session led by Shilpa Rele Scholarly Communication & Data Curation Librarian, Rowan University.  View Slides and Video These sessions have a flexible focus between RDM and DS. These 90 minutes each quarter are structured around a particular topic and usually involve:  A short visit from invited speaker on topic An in-session discussion and activity We are basing this structure on the former eResearch Network (eRN) cohort model which had a more of a course-based mode. An example eResearch Network syllabus is linked here to give you some more perspective on the history of that group. Our new goal is to bring the best parts of eRN into this revitalized working group. We also connect folks in the working group around consultation ideas. Consultations are working sessions that give consultees a chance to work through an in-depth, peer conversation to solve a local data services or digital scholarship question. Consultants are peers and associated experts (e.g. fellow DLFdds members, former eResearch Network participants, practitioners from other DLF member institutions). Consultations are flexible and customized according to consultee needs.  How to contribute or get involved? As we are working to instill a mutual aid model for our community, we are interested in your ideas. We have opened a survey to pull together these interests and welcome your thoughts. Take our DLF DDS Interest and Ideas Survey: https://bit.ly/dlf-dds-survey  Beyond the survey, please feel free to join our Google Group as announcements and opportunities related to the WG and Digital Scholarship/Data Services in general will be available there.  Our next scheduled meeting will be in December 2020. We hope to see you there!
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	2020 DLF Forum: Building Community With DLF’s Metadata Support Group
Though DLF is best known for our signature event, the annual DLF Forum, our working groups collaborate year round. Long before COVID-19 introduced the concept of “Zoom fatigue” into our lives, DLF’s working groups organized across institutional and geographical boundaries, building community while apart, to get work done. Made possible through the support of our institutional members, working groups are the efforts of a committed community of practitioners, using DLF as a framework for action, engaged in problem-solving in a variety of digital library subfields from project management and assessment to labor and accessibility. Once we decided that the 2020 DLF Forum and affiliated events would be held in a virtual format, it meant that our working groups wouldn’t have the opportunity to meet in person for their typical working meals that take place throughout the Forum; however, this year’s virtual format means that we’ll have more new DLF Forum attendees than ever before. Because DLF’s working groups are open to ALL, regardless of whether you’re affiliated with a DLF member institution or not, we asked leaders of the DLF working groups to introduce their groups and the work they do to the new and returning members of the #DLFvillage in a series of blogs and videos. We’ll share these working group updates in the days leading to this year’s DLF Forum.  The Metadata Support Group is excited to be part of the  2020 DLF Forum virtual community. We would like to share an open invitation for anyone who works with metadata to join our community. The Metadata Support Group was founded in 2016 on Slack in order to provide colleagues from the GLAM (Galleries, Archives, Libraries, Museum) Community with a space to ask questions, get answers, and develop a network of colleagues from institutions across the country. The Metadata Support Group has over 600 members and 18 channels dedicated to topics such as general questions, migrations, conferences, ArchivesSpace, tools, workflows, and much more. Anyone is welcome to join our community, just agree to our code of conduct when you fill out this form. If you have any questions about the group, feel free to reach out to the co-founders and facilitators: Julie Hardesty, jlhardes@iu.edu Liz Woolcott, liz.woolcott@usu.edu Anna Neatrour, anna.neatrour@utah.edu Bria Parker, brialparker@gmail.com
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	2020 DLF Forum: Building Community With DLF’s Labor Working Group
Though DLF is best known for our signature event, the annual DLF Forum, our working groups collaborate year round. Long before COVID-19 introduced the concept of “Zoom fatigue” into our lives, DLF’s working groups organized across institutional and geographical boundaries, building community while apart, to get work done. Made possible through the support of our institutional members, working groups are the efforts of a committed community of practitioners, using DLF as a framework for action, engaged in problem-solving in a variety of digital library subfields from project management and assessment to labor and accessibility. Once we decided that the 2020 DLF Forum and affiliated events would be held in a virtual format, it meant that our working groups wouldn’t have the opportunity to meet in person for their typical working meals that take place throughout the Forum; however, this year’s virtual format means that we’ll have more new DLF Forum attendees than ever before. Because DLF’s working groups are open to ALL, regardless of whether you’re affiliated with a DLF member institution or not, we asked leaders of the DLF working groups to introduce their groups and the work they do to the new and returning members of the #DLFvillage in a series of blogs and videos. We’ll share these working group updates in the days leading to this year’s DLF Forum.  Tools for the LAM Labor Situation The COVID-19 pandemic has only intensified precarity in our field, but we don’t have to face it alone. Over the last 3 years, the Labor Working Group (Labor WG) has been building tools to improve library, archives, and museum (LAM) labor conditions. Nor are we the only ones: Similar efforts are underway in many other groups. Take a tour 🚴 of our resources below and join us as we work to build collective power to take on collective problems. Collective Responsibility Labor Advocacy Toolkit In 2019, members of Labor WG organized and participated in the IMLS-funded Collective Responsibility: National Forum on Labor Practices for Grant-Funded Digital Positions. One idea that surfaced at the forum was to collect the project’s outcomes along with other resources for documenting and changing the landscape of contingent labor in LAM. We created the Collective Responsibility Labor Advocacy Toolkit to publish these materials. During 2020, a group of forum and Labor WG members developed Guiding Principles, naming the concepts which have shaped our work so far and concretizing these into principles for our future work. Another group turned working notes on “How to Talk About Collective Responsibility at Work” into a set of scripts and scenarios for discussing contingency and precarity in your actual workplace. We collaborated with members of the Archival Workers Emergency Fund organizing committee to develop these scenarios. In response to the pandemic, we assembled a page of emergency resources for contingent or suddenly-precarious LAM workers. Valuing Labor in Digital Libraries In 2018 we published a research agenda identifying areas for investigation and action in LAM labor: Recognizing labor as being undervalued, unacknowledged, and erased has long been framed as an individual concern in the field of digital libraries, archives, and museums (LAM); but organized and collective action is required to address labor conditions at structural and organizational scales. Such action requires information, from empirical evidence to testimonies to guidance and best practices. This document lays out a research agenda for valuing labor, collaboratively developed by members of the Digital Library Federation Working Group on Labor in Digital Libraries, Archives, and Museums (Labor WG). We intend for research building upon this agenda to also be collaborative: by and for the DLF community. Each section of the agenda describes a key research area and why it matters, offering questions and research designs that bear investigating. In early 2020, a few members of Labor WG set out to research these questions: To what extent and how are digital LAM workers organized? What organizing and advocacy tactics can be effective while minimizing risk for workers? What are creative and effective ways to share data about digital LAM labor? We got totally derailed (thanks, COVID) but those questions are still out there and still important, probably more than ever. If you build something from the research agenda, we’d love to hear about it. Do Better, Love Us In January 2020, we published a document that has been underway since the working group’s formation. “Do Better” -Love(,) Us is built around a simple principle: When funding a term position, fund a good position. If you’re writing a grant, it means asking for what you need for such a position, not lowballing on labor in order to win a grant. For funders, it means approving those applications, even if it means funding fewer projects. The cost of these projects should not fall on the workers least equipped to bear it. Our work on this document inspired the Collective Responsibility project. While it sparked conversations at the forums and shaped some of the project’s outcomes, and our revision used ideas, data, and new collaborations developed during the forum, we kept this document within Labor WG. It was important to us to retain this document’s aspirational nature, rather than reducing it to the most practical next steps available at this time. Connect with LAM labor organizers This work is much too big for just one group. Members of Labor WG didn’t want to build one-time solutions or reinvent the wheel, so we went looking for others advocating and organizing to improve the situation of LAM workers. We built a list of organizations and campaigns (see it as a table or a list). We also built up a bibliography on LAM labor, from scholarly articles to local news to blog posts to Twitter threads. Lately we’ve been using news alerts to attend to what’s happening to LAM workers around the world during the pandemic and what they’re doing about it. We know that people are losing their jobs, being furloughed, being replaced, losing pay and benefits, taking on new work outside of their job Read More
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	2020 DLF Forum: Building Community With DLF’s Working Group on Privacy and Ethics in Technology
Though DLF is best known for our signature event, the annual DLF Forum, our working groups collaborate year round. Long before COVID-19 introduced the concept of “Zoom fatigue” into our lives, DLF’s working groups organized across institutional and geographical boundaries, building community while apart, to get work done. Made possible through the support of our institutional members, working groups are the efforts of a committed community of practitioners, using DLF as a framework for action, engaged in problem-solving in a variety of digital library subfields from project management and assessment to labor and accessibility. Once we decided that the 2020 DLF Forum and affiliated events would be held in a virtual format, it meant that our working groups wouldn’t have the opportunity to meet in person for their typical working meals that take place throughout the Forum; however, this year’s virtual format means that we’ll have more new DLF Forum attendees than ever before. Because DLF’s working groups are open to ALL, regardless of whether you’re affiliated with a DLF member institution or not, we asked leaders of the DLF working groups to introduce their groups and the work they do to the new and returning members of the #DLFvillage in a series of blogs and videos. We’ll share these working group updates in the days leading to this year’s DLF Forum.  In this blog post, we briefly describe the mission and activities of the DLF Privacy and Ethics in Technology Working Group. Overview of the Working Group The DLF Privacy and Ethics in Technology Working Group is based on the recognition that libraries are increasingly investing in systems that can collect, store, analyze, and potentially leak data related to user activities. The work of the group focuses on challenging and complicating our relationship with data collection technologies. We then seek to create tools and resources to help practitioners critically engage with these data collection technologies, with the goal of aligning our practice with privacy-oriented principles—for the ultimate betterment of our profession, our user communities, and society. Resources Produced by the Working Group Members We have an active and thriving group membership. Over the past few years, our members have collaborated to co-produce new resources to improve practice in support of privacy and responsible use of data-collecting technologies: A Practical Guide to Performing a Library User Data Risk Assessment in Library-Built Systems — https://osf.io/v2c3m/  Vendor Privacy Policy Analysis Project — https://osf.io/69svz/   Advocacy Action Plan — https://osf.io/2smrf/   Digital Privacy Instruction Curriculum — https://osf.io/sebhf/   Ethics in Research Use of Library Patron Data: Glossary and Explainer  https://osf.io/bygj3/  Joining the Working Group Our working group is flexible and adaptable according to our members’ interests. If you would like to contribute to the production of resources like those listed above, or if you want to help build a new resource that addresses a different topic in this area, consider joining our group. We have a wiki available through the DLF website that provides more information: https://wiki.diglib.org/Privacy_and_Ethics_in_Technology.  Future Directions Moving ahead, we as co-conveners want to emphasize greater collaboration and visibility with other groups and organizations that focus on privacy, ethics, and the responsible use of technology. Through collaboration and cross-learning with other related organizations—including those in adjacent fields—we hope to strengthen our work in pursuit of shared goals. We’re especially emphasizing building deeper relationships with public librarians and librarians of diverse backgrounds. We hope that you’re doing well wherever you are, and we hope that we’ll be talking to you soon about privacy and ethics in technology. — Scott W. H. Young, UX & Assessment Librarian, Montana State University — Michelle Gibeault,  Scholarly Engagement Librarian for the Humanities, Tulane University
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	2020 DLF Forum: Building Community With DLF’s Digital Accessibility Working Group
Though DLF is best known for our signature event, the annual DLF Forum, our working groups collaborate year round. Long before COVID-19 introduced the concept of “Zoom fatigue” into our lives, DLF’s working groups organized across institutional and geographical boundaries, building community while apart, to get work done. Made possible through the support of our institutional members, working groups are the efforts of a committed community of practitioners, using DLF as a framework for action, engaged in problem-solving in a variety of digital library subfields from project management and assessment to labor and accessibility. Once we decided that the 2020 DLF Forum and affiliated events would be held in a virtual format, it meant that our working groups wouldn’t have the opportunity to meet in person for their typical working meals that take place throughout the Forum; however, this year’s virtual format means that we’ll have more new DLF Forum attendees than ever before. Because DLF’s working groups are open to ALL, regardless of whether you’re affiliated with a DLF member institution or not, we asked leaders of the DLF working groups to introduce their groups and the work they do to the new and returning members of the #DLFvillage in a series of blogs and videos. We’ll share these working group updates in the days leading to this year’s DLF Forum. The DLF Digital Accessibility Working Group (DAWG) is a group dedicated to exploring issues around ensuring efficient access for disabled people in information organizations. Within DAWG, there are three subgroups: Advocacy and Education, IT and Development, and Policies and Workflows. These three areas were selected because they were identified as essential to ensuring a holistic approach to the adoption, implementation, and maintenance of inclusive practices for disabled users, staff, and other information organization stakeholders. DAWG subscribes to the idea that in order for technology, or “the digital library,” to be accessible, it is not enough that the software, hardware, and accompanying resources be accessible. Instead, there is a need within organizations and outside vendors for: Cultural change regarding awareness of the disability rights efforts of the past and present via continuing education and advocacy work. Adaptable policies and workflows that are inclusive of disabled people and enforced on an institutional level via allocation of financial, legal, and human resources. Emphasis on inclusive design and development practices to ensure that technologies are designed to be accessible, as well as to be maintained sustainably with accessibility in mind. Though only founded within the last year, DAWG has managed to initiate meaningful dialogue around these issues while acting as a source of community for information professionals looking to navigate the challenges posed, both by the field in general, as well as the more contemporary challenges posed by COVID-19. IT and Development The IT and Development subgroup focuses on specific software, hardware, and development practices associated with information organizations. From a list of suggested software, we’ve already developed a deep-dive into the accessibility of Zoom, and are gathering information on many other software applications. Ultimately, we’d like to develop a system for the GLAM community to easily ask questions or share information about the accessibility of software, building off the existing networks and centers for information for AT professionals. Some of the other projects we’ve done include the Accessible Documentation guidelines and a collection of Accessibility Auditing resources. For more information, contact Debbie Krahmer dkrahmer@colgate.edu Advocacy and Education Libraries and information organizations have a responsibility to proactively build features into our products and services that recognizes the value and rights of people with disabilities. This requires continual learning as well as creative and collaborative advocacy.  As a new working group, the advocacy and education subgroup seeks contributors who welcome complexity and responsibility.  This means, when possible, fixing a regular, monthly meeting time in our calendars, as well as reserving time throughout the month to do a bit of work. Most recently, this sub-group hosted a kick-off webinar, Inclusive Design and Accessible Exhibits: Some Guidance for Libraries, Galleries, and Museums by Sina Bahram. Advocacy and Continuing Education wiki page For information, contact Mark Weiler (mweiler@wlu.ca) Policies and Workflows GLAM organizations incorporate a wide variety of policies and workflows, with varying levels of success. This subgroup is collecting best practices, implementation processes, and educational materials to help individuals in GLAM organizations authentically implement accessibility policies and workflows in digital libraries. Some of the work we have embarked on thus far has included defining the scope of digital library policies and workflows, conducting an environmental scan of policies and workflows, and creating a toolkit to be used with digital libraries. The toolkit will contain a reflection of many of the conversations the subgroup has had revolving around the successful implementation of policies and workflows – and not only the suggested content GLAM institutions will want to adopt. The individuals working together represent a wide variety of types of institutions, locations, and experience. Each individual has had responsibilities in their home organization to implement accessible policies and workflows in regards to digital libraries. For scholars and practitioners alike, the work being conducted to create recommendations represents the practical knowledge others need. To learn more about the work, completed resources are available on the DLF Wiki Subpage for Policies and Workflows. To join in the conversation, please email the co-chairs, Gabriel Galson at galson@temple.edu and Amy Vecchione at amyvecchione@boisestate.edu. Getting Involved If you want to learn more about the work DAWG is doing, check out the Digital Accessibility Group wiki. You can also join the listserv (Google Group), attend meetings (updates about meeting times are shared via the listserv, and join the Slack channel. For additional questions regarding the group, feel free to email Jasmine Clark at jasmine.l.clark@temple.edu.
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	2020 DLF Forum: Building Community With DLF’s Project Managers Group
Though DLF is best known for our signature event, the annual DLF Forum, our working groups collaborate year round. Long before COVID-19 introduced the concept of “Zoom fatigue” into our lives, DLF’s working groups organized across institutional and geographical boundaries, building community while apart, to get work done. Made possible through the support of our institutional members, working groups are the efforts of a committed community of practitioners, using DLF as a framework for action, engaged in problem-solving in a variety of digital library subfields from project management and assessment to labor and accessibility. Once we decided that the 2020 DLF Forum and affiliated events would be held in a virtual format, it meant that our working groups wouldn’t have the opportunity to meet in person for their typical working meals that take place throughout the Forum; however, this year’s virtual format means that we’ll have more new DLF Forum attendees than ever before. Because DLF’s working groups are open to ALL, regardless of whether you’re affiliated with a DLF member institution or not, we asked leaders of the DLF working groups to introduce their groups and the work they do to the new and returning members of the #DLFvillage in a series of blogs and videos. We’ll share these working group updates in the days leading to this year’s DLF Forum. All of our 2020 events are free of charge. Register by November 1. Join DLF’s Project Managers Group during their Forum working session on November 17. What is the Project Managers Group? The DLF Project Managers Group (or DLF PMG) was formed in 2008 to acknowledge the intersection between project management and library technology. We provide a place to share project management methodologies and tools, alongside broader discussions that consider issues such as portfolio management and cross-organizational communication, and have branched into discussions of personnel management as well. We look to keep pace with the digital library landscape by bringing new and evolving project management practices to the attention and mutual benefit of our colleagues. This has been a big focus this year as many of us have made the transition to managing teams remotely. You can find more information about our group on the DLF PMG Wiki. This year the Project Managers Group decided to take on a new mentoring initiative as well as expand a webinar program series that we’ve offered on a limited basis to help connect and support project managers. Mentoring: In June 2020, the Project Managers Group launched its pilot of a project management mentoring program. This was in response to feedback the Steering Committee has heard at meetings and past Forums for several years. The committee wanted to provide an opportunity to connect with other project managers in our field to ask advice, share ideas, and learn from someone at a different organization. The goals of the program are to cultivate relationships and communication between project managers who have different experiences and areas of interest in digital libraries throughout the year. The committee envisioned this program as geared toward anyone in the field–new professionals or experienced project managers–who are looking to gain new perspectives.  Our first cohort of mentors and mentees are currently in their third month of the program and by all accounts, everyone is finding this program insightful and worthwhile. We recently sent out our first quarter survey for participants and got positive feedback from everyone on the experience so far. Especially right now, as our professional lives are so upended, mentors and mentees are appreciative of someone to bounce ideas off and commiserate with – no matter their prior experience. Based on the success of this pilot program, the Steering Committee will continue to offer this mentoring program and hope to call for a second cohort in Spring 2021. Webinars: The Project Managers Group provides webinars to keep pace with the dynamic digital library landscape, by bringing new and evolving project management, service design, user experience, and assessment practices to the DLF community. The webinars are recorded and uploaded to the DLF YouTube channel and then linked to the PMG Wiki so that they can be shared with a wider audience. This year, speakers presented on new technologies and practices in project management.  Melissa Wisner, IT Project and Portfolio Management Librarian at North Carolina State University Libraries, spoke about Before Action Review, a method used by teams at the onset of a project to talk through anticipated changes, assumptions, and risks by drawing on the lessons learned from past experiences.  Jenn Nolte, User Experience (UX) Librarian at Yale University Library, spoke about User Experience and Service Design. The talk focused on the importance of putting the end user’s needs at the center when planning for new services or enhancing current services. Casey Davis Kaufman, Associate Director of the GBH Media Library and Archives, spoke about leading teams and projects while working remotely during the ongoing global pandemic crisis. The presentation covered a range of topics relevant to the present remote-working environment–effective communication and support, managing expectations, measuring productivity and impact, providing resources, and ‘holding space’ for team members who may be experiencing incredibly challenging and emotionally difficult situations within and/or outside of work. These virtual sessions provide an opportunity for Project Managers to learn and share new information with others in the field. We are always looking for feedback from our audience. If you have any suggestions for future webinars or if you would like to present at one of the sessions, please reach out to us via our listserv.  Toolkit: We’ve also continued to enhance our collective documentation and aides for all, including the DLF Project Managers Toolkit. The Toolkit is a collaborative project, based on contributions by members of the DLF Project Managers Group over the years. The Toolkit offers crowdsourced information, tips, techniques, and tools for project managers working in or with digital libraries. We include information on project management basics, documentation and templates shared by members, and evaluations of some of the popular project management Read More
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	Update on DLF’s Senior Program Officer Search
Dear DLF Community, Following our recent news about what is shaping up to be an exciting Forum, we wanted to also update you on the DLF Senior Program Officer position that was posted earlier this year. The search was notable for its strong, diverse pool of candidates and the many perspectives each could bring to DLF. The process was conducted with professional diligence and benefited significantly from the expertise and insight of the search committee, culminating in a lively final round of interviews. Unexpectedly, we were not able to make a successful offer. While we are fortunate to still have a very strong candidate pool, we feel it is important to pause and reflect upon the recent search and wider context and conditions that may have influenced its outcome. We have had conversations with search firms lately that corroborate a significant rise in candidates declining job offers nationally across disciplines and professions. The reasons for this are being explored, but it is believed that many of the positions—like the one for DLF—were posted pre-COVID and that the increased unpredictability of the academic workplace and the understandable avoidance of risk-taking could be significant factors. Given the importance of the DLF leadership position, we plan to start a second search in early January. CLIR has begun an internal evaluation of the first round search process. This review is taking into account the changes in our academic environment stemming from the disruptions of, and responses to, the pandemic, including a profound rethinking of approaches to teaching, research, information sharing, and community building, as well as the implications for institutional budgets near and longer-term. As always, your support and engagement are deeply appreciated and essential to DLF’s continued success. Charles J. Henry President
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	2020 DLF Forum: Building Community With DLF’s Assessment Interest Group
Though DLF is best known for our signature event, the annual DLF Forum, our working groups collaborate year round. Long before COVID-19 introduced the concept of “Zoom fatigue” into our lives, DLF’s working groups organized across institutional and geographical boundaries, building community while apart, to get work done. Made possible through the support of our institutional members, working groups are the efforts of a committed community of practitioners, using DLF as a framework for action, engaged in problem-solving in a variety of digital library subfields from project management and assessment to labor and accessibility. Once we decided that the 2020 DLF Forum and affiliated events would be held in a virtual format, it meant that our working groups wouldn’t have the opportunity to meet in person for their typical working meals that take place throughout the Forum; however, this year’s virtual format means that we’ll have more new DLF Forum attendees than ever before. Because DLF’s working groups are open to ALL, regardless of whether you’re affiliated with a DLF member institution or not, we asked leaders of the DLF working groups to introduce their groups and the work they do to the new and returning members of the #DLFvillage in a series of blogs and videos. We’ll share these working group updates in the days leading to this year’s DLF Forum. All of our 2020 events are free of charge. Register by November 1. Updates from the DLF Assessment Interest Group (AIG) The DLF Assessment Interest Group (AIG) seeks to engage the community in developing best practices and guidelines for various kinds of digital library assessment. As the amount of digitized/born-digital content continues to grow at our research and cultural heritage institutions, there is an ever-increasing need to strategically standardize our assessment efforts.  The only requirement for participation in a DLF AIG working group is a willingness to dig in and devote a small part of your time contributing to the tools, methods, and body of knowledge on digital library assessment. We encourage you to join a meeting or reach out to the contacts listed below. (DLF membership is not a requirement for participation.) We look forward to extending an invitation for you to join us at our upcoming AIG virtual event in early 2021, which will showcase working group achievements and help us brainstorm for the year ahead. Stay tuned for event details!  In the meantime, here’s an overview of the five AIG working groups and along with some recent highlights. The groups represented in this post are: the Content Reuse Working Group, the Cost Assessment Working Group, the Cultural Assessment Working Group, the Metadata Assessment Working Group, and the User Experience Assessment Working Group. AIG Content Reuse Working Group The Content Reuse Working Group (#digreuse) focuses on developing standards, strategies, and workflows for assessing the use and reuse of digital objects across galleries, libraries, archives, museums, and repositories (GLAMR) Content Reuse Working Group in 2020 The Content Reuse Working Group is developing the Digital Content Reuse Assessment Framework Toolkit (D-CRAFT). The D-CRAFT project, generously funded by a National Leadership Grants for Libraries (LG-36-19-0036-19) award from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, started in July 2019.  Working group members are building the toolkit in two phases of work. The first phase includes work on ethical guidelines and recommended practices.  Ethical Guidelines. The Guidelines are intended for practitioners assessing use and reuse of digital cultural heritage artifacts, research outputs and scholarship, and data. These guidelines are meant both to inform practitioners in their decision-making, and to model for users what they can expect from those who steward digital collections. Integral to the creation of this code are user privacy considerations, and a particular focus on concerns and ideas of Black, Indigenous, people of color, people with disabilities, working class, and poor communities. The working group is currently finalizing an Ethical Guidelines for Assessing Reuse draft for public review and comment.  Recommended Practices. Recommended practices will document tools, resources, and existing strategies for assessing various facets of digital object reuse. Along the way, the working group will develop draft content with D-CRAFT Consultants, solicit feedback from their Advisory Group and GLAMR practitioners, and launch the toolkit. How can you participate? We encourage those interested in knowing more about the project to visit the D-CRAFT project site as well as to review a 2019 DLF Blog post Introducing D-CRAFT. Those who have questions or comments should feel free to reach out to Santi Thompson. AIG Cost Assessment Working Group We dig into the cost (both time and money) of digitization. Cost Assessment Working Group in 2020 Building on the development of the Digitization Cost Calculator, the AIG Cost Group is shifting directions to create a more expansive toolkit that will serve a wider range of digitization labs.  Survey. We are seeking information from a variety of digitization stakeholders from across the DLF to inform two new initiatives. The data collected will be used to help create resources for calculating and assessing institutional commitments necessary for successful digitization projects or starting a digitization program. Resource Library. We are looking to assemble a resource library similar to the DLF AIG Metadata Application Profile Clearinghouse Project. The survey data will help us gather some preliminary information about the various organizations successfully using cost assessment tools in their local context. If possible, we will link to or provide samples which may provide a template for other organizations. Cost Worksheets. We seek more data on those interested in cost assessment practices that will give us better insight into how to further develop templates for “cost worksheets” which might be applied at the institutional level and modified for local use. Unlike the cost calculator, these worksheets would be generated from local information to give end-users more contextualized information.  Digitization costs can be calculated in terms of either/both money and time, which themselves exist in tension with one another. For the purposes of this work, digitization is defined as the practices and procedures associated with reformatting physical Read More
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	2020 DLF Forum: Building Community With DLF’s Born-Digital Access Working Group
Though DLF is best known for our signature event, the annual DLF Forum, our working groups collaborate year round. Long before COVID-19 introduced the concept of “Zoom fatigue” into our lives, DLF’s working groups organized across institutional and geographical boundaries, building community while apart, to get work done. Made possible through the support of our institutional members, working groups are the efforts of a committed community of practitioners, using DLF as a framework for action, engaged in problem-solving in a variety of digital library subfields from project management and assessment to labor and accessibility. Once we decided that the 2020 DLF Forum and affiliated events would be held in a virtual format, it meant that our working groups wouldn’t have the opportunity to meet in person for their typical working meals that take place throughout the Forum; however, this year’s virtual format means that we’ll have more new DLF Forum attendees than ever before. Because DLF’s working groups are open to ALL, regardless of whether you’re affiliated with a DLF member institution or not, we asked leaders of the DLF working groups to introduce their groups and the work they do to the new and returning members of the #DLFvillage in a series of blogs and videos. We’ll share these working group updates in the days leading to this year’s DLF Forum. All of our 2020 events are free of charge. Register by November 1. Join the Born-Digital Access Working Group during their Forum working session on November 17. Who are we? The DLF Born-Digital Access Working Group, or what is affectionately known as BDAWG, is currently led by co-coordinators Karla Irwin and Jessika Drmacich. BDAWG is the only born-digital group focused entirely on access. BDAWG is very easy to join and the group is open to everyone! Our Google Group is our main mode of communication, so please sign up there if you would like to receive updates and more information. BDAWG meets bimonthly and there are many different opportunities for participation based on area of interest and availability. If you are curious about what members have published so far you can also check out DLF’s OSF site for our BDAWG. At around 200 members, BDAWG garners participation from a wide gamut of archivists, librarians, and cultural heritage workers coming from higher education institutions, museums, government archives, and even some students. What have we been working on? In August of 2020, BDAWG held our first ever Virtual Colloquium. This was an opportunity for BDAWG members to share some work related to born-digital access at their respective institutions. We had a fantastic turnout and there are hopes to hold this event again next year. Also this year, BDAWG formed five sub-working groups focused around researching different born-digital access topics. These subgroups are typically formed once a year and are discussed, decided, and voted on by our members. Updates on our sub-working groups! The Access Values subgroup completed a values statement for BDAWG on the topic of how to approach work around born-digital access. You can read the Access Values here. Special thanks to Jessica Farrell, Brain Dietz, and Alison Clemens for their great work on this! The Documenting Access Methods subgroup is exploring what elements institutions could include in documentation for providing access. Documenting Access Methods include two *sub-subgroups*: a Framework group and a Pointer group. The Framework group is creating a framework or template for documentation and the Pointer group will categorize and point to existing documentation. The Documenting Access Methods subgroup plans to wrap up their work by the end of this year so be on the lookout for that! The Donor Relations subgroup has been developing a resource for managing remote donor relations and acquisitions in the form of an annotated bibliography that will be available very soon. Once that is wrapped up, future work by a new subgroup will be looking at remote on-site visits and born-digital acquisitions. There will be some upcoming forums on this topic, so be on the lookout for information (or you can reach out to us)! The Legal Due Diligence subgroup is creating a resource that helps practitioners understand what steps are needed to provide low-risk access with a close look at Attorney Client Privilege, Culturally Sensitive Materials, Donor Restrictions, FERPA and HIPAA, GDPR, Institutionally Mandated Confidentiality, PII, Privacy, and Terms of Service. They plan on releasing a skeletal set of guidelines with a workflow once they wrap up their research. The Ideal Access Systems subgroup is working to define what ‘ideal’ access means in order to provide recommendations on how to create and implement ideal access systems in different environments. They are currently working on a literature review of relevant articles and case-studies and finalizing a functional definition of ideal in order to move into their next stage which involves building a project plan for an ideal access system. The subgroup hopes to release their documentation by the beginning of next year. Get in touch! Please reach out to Karla and/or Jessika with questions! Jessika, Williams College, (jgd1@williams.edu) Karla, University of Nevada, Las Vegas (karla.irwin@unlv.edu) Keep these links handy: BDAWG Google Group: https://tinyurl.com/BDAWGGG DLF OSF website: https://osf.io/hqmy4/  We hope to see you at a future BDAWG meeting!
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	Announcing Incoming NDSA Coordinating Committee Members for 2021- 2023
Please join me in welcoming the two newly elected Coordinating Committee members Elizabeth England and Jessica Neal, and one re-elected member, Linda Tadic. Their terms begin January 1, 2021 and run through December 31, 2023.   Elizabeth England is a Digital Preservation Specialist at the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, where she participates in strategic and operational initiatives and services for the preservation of born-digital and digitized records. She previously was the Digital Archivist and a National Digital Stewardship Resident at Johns Hopkins University. Elizabeth currently serves on the NDSA Communications and Publications group and the DigiPres 2020 Planning Committee. Jessica Neal, was recently named the Sterling A. Brown Archivist at Williams College, having previously been the  College Archivist at Hampshire College. Additionally, Jes is a workshop facilitator with DocNow, and a member of NDSA’s DigiPres 2020 Planning Committee.  Linda Tadic has served on the Coordinating Committee for the past two years. As an educator, she incorporates NDSA reports and projects into her courses in the UCLA Information Studies department. Additionally, Linda brings her diverse experience working in non-profit and educational archives, managing digital asset management systems, and founding Digital Bedrock, a managed digital preservation service provider. We are also grateful to the very talented, qualified individuals who participated in this election. We are indebted to our outgoing Coordinating Committee members, Karen Cariani, Bradley Daigle (Chair), Sibyl Schaefer, and Paige Walker, for their service and many contributions. To sustain a vibrant, robust community of practice, we rely on and deeply value the contributions of all members, including those who took part in voting.
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