2018 Upper Midwest Digital Collections Conference

Please note there will NOT be laptops available.  Attendees are encouraged to bring their own laptops for the workshop. This is a paid pre-conference workshop that you must register for.

The UMDCC Born Digital Access Bootcamp will focus on building strategies to provide access to born-digital material.

Designed as an opportunity for practitioners and beginners to learn from one another, the workshop will take a collaborative approach with group discussions on relevant topics guided by workshop facilitators, followed by hands-on demonstrations of born-digital access systems and breakout discussion sessions.

Topics will be selected through surveying workshop participants and through forum discussion, but will ultimately address how policies, copyright/risk assessment, user needs, reference interactions, processing workflows, donor relations, advocacy, and other archival functions affect how, when, and what we provide access to, with an emphasis on user-driven access throughout.

Computer access will be available as this workshop takes place in a computer lab. This is a paid pre-conference workshop that you must register for.

The modern library has seen a new area of our holdings and collection efforts emerge: unique digital collections. As our users’ needs and fluency with technology have changed, so have our library services and avenues for information delivery. Our users want digital materials at the ready, and they want them now! While our holdings have easily adapted to acquiring additional databases and new ebooks, how do we address the growing need for our unique materials to be digitized? Moreover, how do small, resource-strapped institutions fulfill this need?

Join archivists Heather Stecklein and Nathalie Wheaton, and digital projects librarian Amy Bocko for a crash course on launching digital projects at your own resource-strapped institution.  In this collaborative workshop we will provide an overview of launching sustainable digital programs and share detailed case studies of successful digital collections. The interactive portion of the workshop will include digital project planning exercises, open access project plans/digitization guidelines, learning more about working with the Internet Archive from an archival perspective and resources/strategies to secure faculty and student buy-in.  Participants will leave with the perspective and resources to launch their own successful digital projects at their home institutions!

Attendees are encouraged to bring their own laptops, though not required. This is a paid pre-conference workshop that you must register for.

What kind of information do you currently provide to users about who may own rights in items in your collections, and how those items can be used? How confident are you in that information? Rightsstatements.org provides new tools you can use to more accurately represent the rights status of materials in your collection. RightsStatements.org is a joint initiative of Europeana and the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) that has developed a simple, standardized system of labels that more clearly communicate the copyright and re-use status of digital objects to the public. Adding these labels to your collections will improve usability and access for users while increasing the depth of your organizational metadata.

This workshop will provide an overview of some of the basic background copyright issues, a detailed review of the Rights Statements labels, and offer workflows and other suggestions for implementing the labels with your digital collections. Expect to confront some complex processes - it can be quite challenging to track down the information needed to assess who, if anyone, owns the rights to an item. Expect some uncertainties - it is frequently not possible to get a perfectly clear idea who might own the copyright in an item. But also expect some fun and surprises - we've encountered a 1905 photograph that is likely in copyright until at least 2031, and some tourist brochures from the mid-1970s that are almost certainly in the public domain!  

Please note: RSVP was required for this event.
Thursday, November 8, 6-8 p.m. (welcome remarks at 6:15)
Minneapolis Institute of Art
2400 Third Avenue South
Minneapolis, Minnesota 55404

The event is located in the Target Wing of Mia. Use the main entrance to the museum, located off of Third Avenue South. 

• Walk through the main entrance and straight ahead (outdoors) towards the Target Wing. 
  
• Once in the Target Wing, use the elevator or stairs to go to the 3rd floor. 
  
• Pick up your badge at the registration table, and enter the Reception Hall.
  

The Library of Congress (LOC) is launching its first-ever digital strategy, building on the premise of computational access to collections. Ms. Potter will discuss how enabling the use of library collections as data fully leverages the value of digitized materials and creates pathways to revealing new connections and new knowledge in our institutions. The new digital strategy is part of a wider, user-centered, focus at the Library of Congress that seeks to connect our collections, programs and staff to the American public. The LOC's Digital Innovation Labs team facilitates experiments that demonstrate, validate, or inform the digital strategy. With programs like the Citizen Historian transcription and tagging platform, Innovator in Residence, and digital scholarship services, the team is enabling transformational experiences for visitors and users.  

In 2016, Iowa State University Library was awarded a grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources to create the Avian Archives of Iowa Online, a web portal for digital Iowa ornithological primary sources dating from 1895-2012. The items selected for this project incorporate a range of genres which reveal both the human elements of birding as well as more scientific field observations. A major portion of our project is to test a method for the extraction of biodiversity data from archival collections. In addition to DublinCore records, we are creating a second layer of metadata for a subset of detailed bird sighting records from the Iowa Ornithologists’ Union to encode these records using field observation data standards (DarwinCore) for sharing via natural science data consortia.
 
This session will provide an introduction to how we have developed and managed this large project using a combination of existing tools, new metadata practices, and custom web development. We will demonstrate how we are managing this project in the midst of a migration to new digital collections software and how we have relied on, and contributed to, open metadata resources.  

Join Jason Roy, Director of Digital Library Services, University of Minnesota Libraries, and Meghan O’Brien, Senior Imaging Specialist at The Crowley Company, as they discuss their collection digitization partnership over ten projects, five years and 300,000 images. Learn about the projects (both institutional repository materials and archival), the processes and how to successfully navigate the client-vendor relationship to best benefit your organization.

Over the course of twenty years the Library Company of Philadelphia published a total of sixty online exhibitions, its first being Ardent Spirits in 1999. What started as simply a way to share a short-lived gallery exhibition more broadly later evolved into a key marketing piece of the exhibition lifecycle. Today, online exhibitions are brought into the fold of all that is digital in the library. An ecosystem of digital life has emerged with each collection item featured in an online exhibition being linked to subject guides, blog posts, social media, and the digital asset repository.  Online exhibitions are the library’s historical record of how web design, accessibility, digitization, content management, and user experience have changed over the last two decades.  As we look towards the future, we must consider the implications of both changes in technology and user expectations. Fundamental issues surrounding preservation, sustainability, and emulation must be strategically planned for both new and existing resources. Creative methods of measuring impact, beyond standard web analytics, need to be devised showing a return on investment to guarantee continued funding.        

Providing and preserving digital content is now a ubiquitous part of librarianship. The Library Company hopes their decades of experience, both positive and negative, can inform others as they increase their footprint in this area of collections management.    

Wikimedia Commons provides public domain and Creative Commons licensed images and photos to use for Wikipedia articles, presentations, and other projects. More libraries, archives, and museums are making use of Wikimedia Commons to bring traffic to their digital collections, and content creators are using Wikimedia Commons to archive photos of landmarks, people, and art, as well as to record historical events.

In this 2-part session, Wikipedian Librarian Rachel Wexelbaum and Charles Walbridge, Lead Collections Photographer at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, will introduce Wikimedia Commons, explain how they use it for their work and incorporate it into workflows, will demonstrate how to upload images to Commons and license them properly, then will be on hand to help you upload an image or two.  

By the end of this two-part presentation, the audience will be able to

• Define Wikimedia Commons and describe its contents;
• Explain the multiple purposes of Wikimedia Commons for students, researchers, content creators, and cultural heritage institutions;
• Upload their own images and/or photos to Wikimedia Commons;
• Apply Creative Commons or public domain licensing to any work uploaded to Wikimedia Commons;
• Determine how to include Wikimedia Commons work in their workflow.

The presentation is a case study of a project to create a digital collection of campus buildings with enhanced metadata. By partnering with the history department and creating class research projects for each building, Wichita State University Libraries is able to generate a mutually beneficial applied learning project. Students, under the guidance of Special Collections staff in conjunction with History faculty, research the buildings using primary sources from Special Collections and provide extensive descriptive metadata. In return, the students' research is published in the CONTENTdm collection and their required applied learning project is completed.

This session will discuss the process of creating a collaborative project like this: how the project was developed, implemented, and lessons learned along the way. There will also be a discussion of ideas for expanding the project into the future.

Conceived in 2003 and established in 2004, the Digital Initiatives Program at Iowa State University Library strives to create archives-based and regional history digital resources that support scholarship, teaching, and learning. While present for nearly a decade, 2016 marked a turning point in Digital Initiatives. Digital Initiatives has transformed from a loosely organized unit, to a full program with a dedicated staff of six. As digital projects became a key initiative within the library, significantly growing in scale and complexity, interdepartmental collaboration became crucial and new teamwork strategies needed to be identified.  As the Digital Initiatives Program revitalized its efforts, projects become more complex and staff members worked across multiple departments within the University Library.  

This session will explore the challenges and opportunities of working collaboratively to create accurate and meaningful content for the web and how to build an effective way of sharing and promoting their use.  Lack of workflows, duplication of efforts, outdated documentation, "who does what?" and "who do I talk to?" were some of the roadblocks the unit overcame. The session will highlight critical steps taken to define roles, develop workflows, and implement project planning. The audience will have insight into these developments and the challenges faced while developing a digital initiatives unit in an academic library.

In 2017 the Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia) was one of four US institutions awarded a place in the inaugural cohort of the National Digital Stewardship Residency for Art Information (NDSR Art). As a host institution, Mia selected an emerging information professional as its Resident to take a lead role in building the foundation for the management, care, and long-term preservation of its growing time-based media/digital art collection.

This session will use the recently completed NDSR Art 2017-18 project at Mia as a Case Study to explore the overlaps and divergences between museum, library and archival approaches to digital preservation and digital stewardship. Members of Mia’s library, its Collections Information Management department, and the NDSR Art Resident will each share a unique perspective on the project, reflecting on the impact and overlap of our varied professional practices.

The presenters will include:
Erin Barsan, NDSR Art Resident 2017-18, Mia
Meg Black, Assistant Librarian, Mia
Frances Lloyd-Baynes, Head of Collections Information Management, Mia
Heidi Raatz, Collections Information Specialist / Permissions Officer, Mia

The presenter pursued conversations, learned tools, and experimented with spaces and services at the intersection of libraries and digital humanities for the last seven years. These efforts led to a partnership in the proposal of a digital humanities major and the hiring of a new faculty member specifically for digital humanities, new teaching partnerships, and the introduction of a makerspace in the Library.

This session will discuss the process and lessons learned as the Bethel University Library grew from an interested party in digital humanities to a key partner and leader on campus. We valued core concepts like committing to conversation as a service model (David Lankes’ Mission for New Librarians) and the Web as a key service point for teaching and scholarship (Mita Williams’ keynote address to the Library Technology Conference in 2014).

Researching the practitioners, concepts, and tools (TimelineJS, Omeka, and CONTENTdm) of digital humanities and building local relationships based on that knowledge was crucial to being able to move deeper into conversations. Through this learning, we were able to support more faculty who wanted to experiment with their teaching or pursue projects and later provide those opportunities to their students.

This session will encourage, inspire, and equip others to pursue digital humanities conversations in their own organizations.  

Wikimedia Commons provides public domain and Creative Commons licensed images and photos to use for Wikipedia articles, presentations, and other projects. More libraries, archives, and museums are making use of Wikimedia Commons to bring traffic to their digital collections, and content creators are using Wikimedia Commons to archive photos of landmarks, people, and art, as well as to record historical events.

In this 2-part session, Wikipedian Librarian Rachel Wexelbaum and Charles Walbridge, Lead Collections Photographer at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, will introduce Wikimedia Commons, explain how they use it for their work and incorporate it into workflows, will demonstrate how to upload images to Commons and license them properly, then will be on hand to help you upload an image or two.  

By the end of this two-part presentation, the audience will be able to

• Define Wikimedia Commons and describe its contents;
• Explain the multiple purposes of Wikimedia Commons for students, researchers, content creators, and cultural heritage institutions;
• Upload their own images and/or photos to Wikimedia Commons;
• Apply Creative Commons or public domain licensing to any work uploaded to Wikimedia Commons;
• Determine how to include Wikimedia Commons work in their workflow.

Preservation of our audiovisual heritage is one of the most pressing concerns for today’s archival professionals. Analog audio and video carriers are rapidly becoming obsolete, due to media degradation and lack of playback equipment. Despite such challenges, these recordings contain valuable research material and need to be made accessible to potential users.

The Archives of Iowa Broadcasting at Wartburg College is currently undertaking the creation of an online media library for its collection of more than 28,000 audio and video recordings, thanks to a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. 

The grant project addresses the dual challenges of preservation – through the reformatting of more than 2,200 videotapes of news broadcast footage from KWWL-TV in Waterloo, Iowa, a flagship news station in eastern Iowa – and providing access to audiovisual collections. The media library utilizes 
Proficio Elements archival collection management software to create each catalog record, then links to a digital copy of the media item that will be accessible online.

This presentation will follow the Online Media Library project from planning and research to implementation, and provide insight on creating a large digital collection with limited resources. Amy Moorman, Project Director and Wartburg Archivist, will also discuss her role as a Lone Arranger managing a large audiovisual archive, and leading an extensive multi-year grant project.

THIS SESSION HAS BEEN CANCELLED.

In 2015, cultural leaders from Eau Claire, Wisconsin boldly declared the region to be the “Music Capital of the North.” Clearly, the burgeoning music scene’s impact on the community was understood, but the roots of the local music scene were unknown.  

How do we create an archive to address this issue? Harnessing this moment, a partnership between the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire’s Special Collections and Archives Department, Public History Program, a local museum, and a local radio station developed a series of events that invited the community to contribute to preserving their history. Offering on-going history harvest events provided an opportunity for individuals to contribute stories and artifacts to the local music digital archive. Contributors, stakeholders, and the public can access these resources online through a digital collection.

This session will explore how the project evolved into a community-oriented, grant-funded digital collection building initiative. The presenters will explore the role of engagement in developing a community of contributors, building a learning experience for students, and creating a model that can be replicated within any budget. Audience members will be invited into this conversation to ask questions about the logistics of organizing community digitization projects and challenges encountered by project partners.  

Join the Minnesota Digital Library’s Metadata Librarian for an overview of one of her recently completed projects. Greta Bahnemann will provide an in-depth explanation of her recent collection gap analysis work for the Minnesota Digital Library’s Minnesota Reflections database. Beginning with a review of the written report, Greta will expand her presentation to include a discussion of her methodology, including the use of Google Analytics, and present the initial set of recommendations for future growth and expansion. The presentation will also include a discussion of the limitations of this kind of work, and the proactive strategies employed to reduce the subjective nature of collection analysis work. The session will conclude with strategies for getting started on conducting your own collection gap analysis and developing new strategies for collection growth and expansion.  

Hennepin County Library has partnered with several Minneapolis-based community and civic organizations in providing content for its digital collections. These include community newspapers, the City of Minneapolis, the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board, Minneapolis Public Schools and other departments in Hennepin County. While the Library continues to serve as a traditional repository in these arrangements, the element of digitization – specifically digital access has provided additional incentive for partnering organizations to work with the Library. These organizations wish to preserve their historic materials, but also to provide access to them. I will explain how the free and open service philosophy of the Public Library combined with professional preservation capabilities and now a robust digitization program have met the wishes and requirements for several organizations and provided the general public with rich and varied information resources.

Our presentations will explore two recent efforts by archives and special collections organizations to engage artists to create new work using our collections, including our digital collections. The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee created the Look Here! project as an avenue to work with fourteen area artists to learn more about how they use archives and digital collections, and to encourage artists and others to engage our digital collections – where we currently have over 140,000 objects freely available – to create new work. The Look Here! project culminates in an exhibit at a local museum in summer 2018 and demonstrates not only how we can work with artists to reach broader audiences, but the power of partnerships with multiple communities to enable this work.

University of Minnesota Libraries used an innovation award to fund an artist in residence program. Three artists were selected for a semester-long residency to work collaboratively with the Libraries’ special collections curators, digital content staff and subject librarians. The artists engaged in open-ended, exploratory projects that were informed or inspired by materials (both physical and digital) in Libraries’ collections, including Archives and Special Collections. The residency goals were to inspire art with historical documents and other sources; build collaboration between artists, archives, and libraries; support artists interested in exploring historical documents; and bring both art and archives to new audiences.

Most people think of Wikipedia as a searchable web-based database. It’s more than that; Wikipedia is made up of an impassioned community of participants (volunteers, editors) who are emotionally and intellectually vested in the collaborative creation of content. We posit that by producing content in Wikipedia, contributors act as “makers” of knowledge; deepening their own curiosity and learning while participating in a collaborative community designed to democratize knowledge.  

Libraries are working closely with Wikipedia by adding information to this free online encyclopedia, primarily through hosting Wikipedia Edit-a-thons. These one-off events are a great way to introduce Wikipedia to the public and for providing training. But is there a more consistent approach for providing ongoing Wikipedia experiences to the public? The answer might be in activating libraries as a “makerspace” for creating content in Wikipedia, which in and of itself is like an online “makerspace”.

The Mia Library has hosted three Edit-a-thons. A key observation take-away from these events is the idea that the participants value the process of learning and the self-affirming sense of well-being that occurs from the act of editing, and that the entries of created information (although very important) are more by-products of this positive experience and not necessarily the primary result. The experience taps into the human instinct to create, collaborate and share with others.  

Our session will focus on what a “makerspace” is, how it could be applied to Wikipedia as an ongoing program in Libraries, and potential ways to measure the human qualitative impact.  

Documenting Fandom: The J. R. R. Tolkien Fandom Oral History Collection at Marquette University 
Marquette University’s J. R. R. Tolkien Collection began with literary manuscripts acquired from the celebrated author in 1957, but it has grown over the past 60 years to document Tolkien scholarship and fandom. Fandom is a challenging phenomenon to document. In 2017 Tolkien Archivist, William Fliss, began building the J. R. R. Tolkien Fandom Oral History Collection, gathering brief testimonials of fans’ love for Tolkien’s works and the ways he has affected their lives. Fliss will introduce the collection, describe his methodology in building it, share plans for its growth and development, and discuss its possible interest to scholars, particularly digital humanists. 

Prairie Memories: Building an oral history collection 
In August 2017, the State Historical Society of North Dakota (SHSND) and Prairie Public Television partnered to document people's Vietnam stories from the North Dakota-Minnesota region. Prairie Public Television would film and edit the oral histories and SHSND would scan pictures, documents, and objects related to their Vietnam stories. Our final project brought the oral histories (as embedded YouTube video) and scanned objects together in Digital Horizons, a CONTENTdm based digital library consortium. Stephanie will outline the project basics and talk about the partnership process.

The Iowa Labor History Oral Project: Revitalizing a Digital Collection for the 21st Century
The Iowa Labor History Oral Project (ILHOP) began in the 1970s as a collaboration between the Iowa Federation of Labor, the University of Iowa (UI) Labor Center, and the State Historical Society of Iowa. The project has become an important teaching and research resource on the UI campus and beyond. With over 1,200 oral history interviews recording memories stretching from the 1890s to the first decades of the twenty-first century, ILHOP is a critical resource for Midwestern social history and one of the largest, longest-running labor-focused oral history projects in the world.

Beginning in 2017, the ILHOP team pursued and were awarded two sizable federal grants to modernize and revitalize this project. In the first stage, the interview audiotapes and transcripts were successfully digitized and made publicly available through the UI Libraries’ Iowa Digital Library website. The implementation of this stage required close collaboration and innovative organization between multiple stakeholders. In the second stage, beginning in July 2018, we will complete transcription and indexing of the collection, making available an expandable digital index of the entire project. These two phases open the door to future projects focused on creating educational materials associated with Iowa Labor history, including those which will meet the new Iowa K-12 History standards. All of this work and collaboration will ensure that scholars and the public will be able to connect to and learn from this rich, unique collection well into the future.  

Two librarians, two technologists, and an archivist--all working to support the fine arts and humanities, and promote the use and creation of digital projects. With our combined expertise in libraries, special collections, and all things digital, we have built a team of experts who work closely with faculty to bring digital collections to the classroom. Together we promote research and analysis using digital collections, primary sources and digital tools that help students consider information from new angles. Working together has strengthened our methodologies and enhanced our approach to digital pedagogy. From Slack channels to Google Team Drive, joint instruction to coffee dates, our approach has enriched campus pedagogy with regard to digital collections and tools. We’ll tell you how we did it, what challenges we faced, and discuss approaches that might work at your particular institution.

Using Omeka to create a state-wide digital repository 
NEKLS used a (lightly) customized version of Omeka to create the Recollections:KS site. In this session, we'll discuss the process of choosing this platform, getting it customized and set up and how we "sold" the project to other libraries around the state of KS. We'll also talk about our ongoing efforts to become a DPLA Content Hub.  

DLSD/Minitex DPLA Onboarding: It's a Snap! 
Please join us as we discuss the recent Digital Library of South Dakota (DLSD) and Minitex collaboration that facilitated DPLA onboarding. An introduction will be given to the Digital Library of South Dakota, and a brief discussion about DLSD collections and features will be presented.