Okay. Good afternoon, and welcome.
My name is Lea DeForest.
I use she/her pronouns, and I'm the communications manager
with Texas Digital Library.
And I want to welcome everyone
to our first virtual open house.
I'm joined today by Kristi Park, TDL's executive director,
Courtney Mumma, TDL's deputy director,
and Alex Flores,
TDL's conference planner and administrative associate.
Today, we're going to talk a bit about TDL's mission
and describe the composition of our membership.
We'll briefly discuss each of our services,
and we'll share the work of our member groups and community.
Next slide, please.
So, first, just a little housekeeping.
We've enabled live captioning,
and you can turn on captioning if you'd like
using that CC icon in the toolbar
at the bottom of your Zoom screen.
We do ask that you keep your mics muted
until the Q&A session at the end of the presentation.
And our presenters will also keep their mics muted
until it's our turn to speak.
We hope you'll use chat box to say "Hello,"
let others know you're here when you arrive,
share your resources and make any comments throughout.
And if you have a question, please do type it into chat,
and we'll have time to answer them
at the end of the presentation.
Finally, this presentation is going to be recorded.
The Q&A session will not, so once we're done presenting,
we'll stop recording and stop screen-sharing
and chat for a while.
Additionally, we'll have a handout
with lots of information that we'll share
at the end of the presentation and in the follow-up email.
And next slide, please.
So, this is our community agreements.
We at Texas Digital Library are all dedicated
to providing an experience for everyone
that is free from all forms of harassment
and inclusive of all people.
We ask that everyone here today be considerate
and respectful in speech and action,
attempt collaboration before conflict,
refrain from demeaning, discriminatory,
or harassing behavior and speech,
and be mindful of your environment
and your fellow participants.
And also want to remind everyone that laughing, smiling,
and having fun is highly encouraged.
We hope you'll feel welcome to engage in today's discussion
however it makes you feel comfortable to do so.
And now we'll get on with the show,
and I'll hand things over to you, Kristi.
- Great. Thanks, Lea.
I'm Kristi Park,
and I'm the executive director of the Texas Digital Library.
I've been with TDL since 2009 in various roles.
So, the organization has been around since about 2005.
I joined it in 2009, more in communications
and sort of doing some technical writing
and coordinating roles.
And I've been executive director since 2015.
So I've seen this organization grow and change a lot
over those years.
And we're really excited to have all of you here
to talk with us today.
I'm going to start with just --
Well, we're going to do this brief presentation
about the organization and the work that we do
with and on behalf of our member partners.
And then we'll leave the rest of the time
for your questions and discussion,
and you can type questions in chat at any point
if you have them.
We'll have plenty of times
to kind of take breaks and chat for a little bit.
You're going to hear from three of us, me and Lea,
who you just heard,
and our deputy director, Courtney Mumma.
And you'll also hear a little bit from some of our members
through quotes from them that we're going to share
throughout the presentation today.
But the three of us welcome you on behalf of a larger staff
and a much larger community that comprises TDL.
So here on the left is our small staff
of eight full-time folks.
And on the right is a portion of our governing board,
which is a photo we took at our spring meeting
just about a week and a half ago.
That board which governs our work
is made up of deans and directors
from our member institutions
and some invited ex officio members,
like the state librarian.
You see Mark Smith there in the bottom left-hand corner,
who we're really sorry to say goodbye to this summer.
This is a great group of folks,
and it's a pleasure to work with them on a regular basis
to transform our libraries
and support the research teaching
and learning missions of our member institutions.
And speaking of missions, this is our mission statement.
TDL is a collaborative consortium based in Texas
and rooted in higher education.
And our mission is to build capacity among our members
for ensuring equitable access to
and preservation of digital content of value
to research, instruction, cultural heritage,
and institutional memory.
So, we say rooted in higher ed because that's where we live.
We are situated within the UT Libraries.
Most of our members are university libraries,
college and university libraries.
And it's an important component of what we do.
However, we do have members
outside of that academic library sphere as well.
And we say "based in Texas" because that's where we're based
and it's part of our identity.
But we, also this year, have just branched outside of Texas
and are welcoming members from other states as well.
Our vision is to become a nationally-recognized leader
as a provider of necessary infrastructure
and to transform society
through the radical broadening of access
to important digital materials.
We want to be a sought-after partner
and a model of community-based collaboration
and service to open access, open data, open education,
and digital preservation.
And we're working to prepare and empower a diverse
and inclusive library workforce
to meet the challenges of the moment
through a number of things, but importantly,
through facilitating sustainable workflows for them
through these shared resources that we provide
and fostering mutually-supportive communities.
And you'll hear a lot about communities
as we go through this presentation.
We are, first and foremost, a membership consortium.
So we're funded by membership fees.
We're governed by our members, as I mentioned.
You can see our current list of members here.
We've celebrated a number of new members this year
that include a lot of firsts for us.
So we have our first community college member
in Tarrant County College,
our first public library member in Houston Public Library,
and our first outside-of-Texas member
in University of Arizona.
So it's been a big growing year for us,
and we're excited to grow some more.
Collectively, this group
equals more than the sum of its parts,
and every new member brings this new energy, new expertise,
a more diverse set of ideas,
as well as more financial resources
to the consortium that accrues to the benefit of everybody.
So we're grateful to this group.
They've put their trust in TDL
to provide essential infrastructure
for their digital libraries and archives.
So, we'll move on into talking about what we mean
when we talk about essential infrastructure.
But before I move on into that, I just want to pause
and see if there are any questions.
Okay, let's move on.
So, we offer a suite of hosted services
that provide a shared technology infrastructure
for scholarly communications, digital scholarship,
and support for cultural heritage collections as well.
And you'll see on this slide
a list of our different service offerings on the left,
and on the right, the open-source software platform
or community-based solution that we use for each service.
Open source is a core part of what we do,
and so we want to highlight what those platforms are
that underlie the services we provide.
Courtney and I are going to spend a little time here
giving a brief overview
of how each of our services can help libraries.
So, we'll start with our digital repository hosting service
which utilizes the open-source software, DSpace.
And you can see here a quote from one of our members,
Colleen Lyon, at UT, talking about the trainings
that were kind of foundational to her role
as a repository manager
and later scho-comm librarian at UT Libraries.
These repositories are foundational components
of the essential infrastructure
that lets our members collect and provide access
to scholarship and teaching materials produced
at their institutions and manage digitized
and digital cultural heritage collections as well.
We host 21 institutional repositories
for 17 subscribing members,
and we use version 6.3 of DSpace currently.
The members who subscribe to this repository service
collect and share all kinds of different materials
in their repositories,
from research publications, and student work,
collections of videos and oral histories,
and also digitize special collections
in institutional archives.
We host the DSpace user group
so that repository managers using DSpace can come together,
and troubleshoot, and problem-solve, and share tips.
And as you saw on that previous quote,
we also provide training for our repository managers
on the use of the software.
So, I mentioned a little bit ago
that we also have done some migrations
from other platforms to DSpace.
Most recently, we migrated a digital commons platform,
sorry, repository for UNT Health Science Center
into TDL hosted DSpace repository
and be happy to answer any questions about that
or put you in contact with our members there at UNT HSC,
if you're interested in learning more.
Okay, I'm going to go ahead and move on, for now, to Vireo.
So, many of our members use Vireo
in conjunction with DSpace.
And they use it to create an end-to-end solution
for electronic thesis and dissertation publication.
Vireo enables an easy, and customizable,
and collaborative workflow
for students to submit their dissertations,
for graduate officers
to manage the approvals of those documents,
and then for them to be published
into the institutional repository.
TDL is the development home
of the Vireo open source software.
So we host it for 14 members,
and we convene a Vireo users group,
which serves as a forum for mutual support
among library and grad school users
but is also the body that oversees collaborative development
of the platform.
Vireo also, as I mentioned,
operates under an open source license.
So, in addition to the schools for whom we host Vireo,
there are an equal number or more
who hosts it for themselves under that open-source license.
So we have a number of users within this community,
including Harvard, MIT, Johns Hopkins, Rice,
and Georgia Tech.
So it's a pretty widely-used platform for managing
the electronic thesis and dissertation
workflow from student's submission to publication.
We work through our communities of practice
that take advantage
of the shared affordable infrastructure we provide
and which can help each other grow professionally
and their libraries grow innovative digital initiatives
and publishing programs.
So, nowhere is this more true
than with our open access journal-hosting service,
which allows members
to establish library publishing programs and work
through our OJS user group to support faculty
and student editorial groups who are managing journals
that we host.
Open access journals allow libraries
to bypass the high cost of print
and provide less costly outlets for scholarly work.
And they empower faculty members
to start their own peer-review journals
without prohibitive hosting costs.
They also allow our member libraries
to build innovative, flexible library publishing programs
with whatever level of resources they have
within their library.
We currently are hosting 72 open access journals
across 12 member institutions,
including for our latest member, the University of Arizona.
And we use the open source platform Open Journal Systems,
or OJS, for this service.
And then, as I mentioned, we have the OJS users group,
which provides support for librarians
who are managing the services locally at their institution.
This quote here is from one of the leaders
within our research data management community.
And I'll talk more about our RDM services in just a second.
Jessica is an expert
and one of the most capable people on the planet.
So, to hear her tell us that she needed the TDL community
to help build research data management services
at UT Libraries is a real testament
to the power and importance of these collaborative groups
and the power of working in community.
Our research data management services are built
around the Texas Data Repository,
which is built in the Dataverse software platform,
which allows researchers
to share, publish, and manage their research data.
The TDR infrastructure
supports TDL member liaison librarians
as they build services locally
to allow researchers to site and disseminate their data sets
and is supported by our TDR steering committee,
which is made up of those institutional liaisons.
So, these services have also grown
to include a data carpentries consortium membership.
And we may or may not be familiar
with the carpentries organization,
but this provides our members with training
to grow a cohort of librarians and others
in fundamental data skills needed to conduct research
so that they can support faculty researchers
on their campuses and help ensure the inclusion of fair
or findable accessible, interoperable,
and reproducible data in the TDR.
Okay, so, the last bit --
The last number of services I've focused on
have really focused on the research function
at colleges and universities,
though our DSpace repositories are used
to collect and share all kinds of materials.
But TDL's mission encompasses not just the research
but the teaching missions of our members as well.
And just in the past few years,
we've grown our service suite
to include support for open educational resources,
those no-costs openly licensed teaching materials
that have proved to improve student success
and student completion rates at many institutions
by addressing the high cost of textbooks
but also through innovative pedagogical practice.
So our OER support services
are people-powered and community-driven,
and they provide support to campus stakeholders
who are engaged in promoting open education initiatives
on their campuses.
It's composed of a number of related initiatives
that include a membership with open education network
that allows us some access to trainings and shared resources
and a nationwide community of practice.
But we also offer a discount program
for the Pressbooks publishing platform.
We host quarterly meetings with our practitioners
to discuss and put our heads together
and share about OER work.
And we also have a group of what we call OER ambassadors
who've committed to serve a term of two years
to develop a community of practice within Texas around OER
and to become a source of expertise for our consortium.
So we'll paste some links in chat
if you want to learn more about the OER support services.
But I'm going to now hand it over to Courtney to tell you
about a couple other services that help to preserve content
and amplify cultural heritage collections.
- Courtney?
- Thanks, Kristi.
This is a well-deserved break for you. (laughs)
So the Digital Public Library of America,
if you haven't heard of it, the DPLA for short,
brings together the riches of America's libraries,
archives, and museums
and makes them freely available to the world online.
The TDL DPLA aggregation service or tech hub
is a metadata aggregator that harvests metadata
only from participating institutions,
cultural heritage repositories,
making those collections more widely-accessible
and discoverable through DPLA.
Over the next couple of years,
TDL's goal is to ensure that every one of our members
with digital cultural heritage collections
has the opportunity to have us harvest those collections
for discovery in DPLA.
The costs for doing this are modest,
and there's more information about that in our Wiki,
and we'll also share that information with you
in the handout that Lea was talking about.
Next slide, please.
This quote here is from Sean Buckner, who is one
of our very enthusiastic digital preservation practitioners
here in Texas.
Digital preservation, as some of you may be aware,
is a complex moving target which requires resources
far beyond what most institutions can allocate on their own.
TDL is the only Texas-based organization
offering digital preservation consulting support
and storage solutions
based on library and archives expertise.
So, on the left side of this slide,
you can see the tidy diagram that we use
to describe how TDL's digital preservation storage works
using the open source DuraCloud dashboard
for ingestion management,
and also attaching to multiple storage options,
including Chronopolis, which is a non-commercial
distributed digital preservation network
that's rooted in the cultural heritage community.
It's home is actually at UC San Diego.
And on the right, you can see the risks octopus.
This graphic is by the Digital Preservation Coalition
based in the UK.
And the risks octopus shows us what it really feels like
for practitioners who are responsible
for digital preservation at their institution
TDL's consulting service and digital preservation,
interest group members
attempt to bring order and calm to their chaos
by offering support and knowledgeable advice to each other.
And now I'll hand over things to Lea to talk a little bit
about some of our community-building efforts,
and I'll come back to you later and talk about a few more.
- Great. Thanks so much, Courtney and Kristi,
for sharing about TDL's suite of services,
and before we power through to our final section,
which is about to TDL's community
and professional development benefits,
just want to remind you all,
if you have any questions about anything
that we've covered so far, our services, mission or vision,
just please drop them in chat, and we'll have plenty of time
to answer them after the presentation.
So, this is a lovely quote from Alexa Hight,
who is a scholarly communications librarian
down in Corpus Christi,
and I thought it really helped set up
when we start talking about community,
and this last section is all about community.
Community is at the heart of everything we do at TDL.
We exist because of the community, of institutional members
that have pooled its resources in us
and because of the people at these institutions
who work with us as partners every day
and TDL staff workers, our members, and partners
to coordinate and enable these communities to exist
and thrive across distance and institutional difference.
And so, some of our different member groups
include the TDL Awards Committee
and TCDL Conference Planning Committee.
Those two committees work on our annual conference,
the Texts Conference On Digital Libraries,
which some of you were able to attend,
and then also nominate winners for our TDL awards,
which we'll talk about in the next slide.
Some of our user groups are based on different services,
such as the DSpace user group, the OJS user group,
Digital Preservation interest group and Vireo user group,
as well as our Texas Data Repository Steering Committee.
And as Kristi mentioned, our TDL OER ambassadors group
is another very productive group
selected from a pool of applicants
among our members who are developing a community of practice
around open educational resources.
We also have a Web Archiving Texas interest group
which launched after a successful event in 2019
and spurred the creation of an archivist consortium discount
for everyone at TDL.
And our members launched two groups, the TDL imaging group,
which is open to anyone working in digitization
or digital imaging, and the GIS interest group
which invites anyone interested in learning
about geographic information systems to join.
And we'll share links
where you can learn more and join all these groups.
We'll share them at the end of the presentation
and in the follow-up email.
So, as promised, I did want to talk a little bit
about TDL awards.
We do have an award winner among us.
Deidre was a 2020 recipient
of our scholarly communication award.
We at TDL are continually inspired
by the amazing work going on within our member libraries
and among our friends and partners
throughout Texas and the region.
And so, every year, through the TDL Awards,
we honor seven individuals and/or groups
that have made outstanding contribution
to the advancement of digital libraries
in various areas of digital library work,
including outreach, scholarly communications,
and a few more.
We also honor a student
who is already making a huge impact in the field
like Alan Garcia,
who is pictured on the slide with his collections.
Alan created the ATX Barrio archive.
It's an exemplary digital archive
that focuses on documenting the effects of gentrification
in Austin's (inaudible) side,
celebrates the culture and history
of Austin's Black and Brown neighborhoods.
And he started this all while he was a student,
so we really love honoring all the amazing work
that's happening out there.
And I'm going to hand things back over to Courtney
who's going to share a few more
of our community-building initiatives with you all.
- Thanks, Lea.
I love seeing these quotes from our members.
TDL's community building culminates
at our annual conference,
the Texas Conference On Digital Libraries, or TCDL.
Since 2007, this conference has grown
to an international audience
while retaining the intimacy of the regional conference.
We provide opportunities there for volunteering, presenting,
and networking among other digital librarians archivists,
software developers,
administrative professionals, and students.
Additionally, TDL's leadership academy started in 2019
with the goals of building the skills necessary
for leading at all levels of the library
and to cultivate a cohort of learners
who seek a professional community for growth.
This year, the leadership academy transitioned
from a full day, in-person workshop
to a free webinar series online that tackled issues
around inclusivity in the library, leading remotely,
and how to navigate the field of academic libraries.
We look forward to seeing this series continue.
All of us at TDL were thrilled to see so many new faces
at this year's first virtual TCDL conference
and leadership academy webinars, including some of you all.
We and our communities composed of member volunteers
work hard to bring you
the best, most affordable experience possible,
and we will continue doing so.
Next slide, please.
I think we all know here, too,
we've been working in a time where community
and human connection is hard to come by.
The community infrastructure built
through our existing relationships
and trust with our members has allowed us to create
and continue those human connections during the pandemic.
We at TDL are always looking
for new ways to connect our members
with more people working in digital libraries.
And these are just a few of the ways
that we've had time to share with you here.
But I'll hand back to Kristi
to close out this portion of the open house,
and then we'll get to chat some more.
- Awesome, thanks, Courtney, and thanks, Lea.
I'm personally really excited to see our friends here today.
Thank you for being here.
We have lots of links to resources and ways to engage
that we'll share with you.
But now I think we're ready
to talk about how to become a member
and just give you a little bit of information about that,
and then we'll open it up for questions and discussion.
So, along with the hosted
technology services we've outlined,
full members of TDL receive a number of other benefits.
Those include the opportunity
to help set the direction of the consortium
through a seat on our member board,
which elects representatives to that governing board
that oversees our operations.
And as full members of TDL, your institutions are connected
to a statewide network of professionals
working in academic libraries
and archives of all sizes in Texas,
as well as to a set of nationwide and global initiatives
that we take part in.
Those include things
like the global Dataverse Community Consortium,
the Digital Public Library of America,
the National Digital Stewardship Alliance,
the Digital Preservation Services Collaborative,
and on, and on, and on.
For added flexibility,
TDL members can structure their service subscriptions
in a number of different ways.
So, we have a base membership fee that gives you access
to all of the community benefits.
So, that includes the conference discounts,
Archive Consortium, the Pressbooks discount,
our Open Education Network membership.
What else?
All of our member groups, some of which are members only,
participation on our awards
and planning committees for TCDL,
all of those community benefits.
In addition to that basic membership, which is a tiered fee
depending on Carnegie classification of the institution,
you can also optionally add services
based on your institution's needs.
It's not required that you add any service,
but if you would like to, you can add one or more,
and there are fees associated with each one of those.
Our pricing is extremely transparent.
All of our membership and service fees
are listed on our website.
We're going to paste a link in chat where you can find those
and be happy to answer any questions about that too.
In addition to the benefits of access to the trainings,
email lists, conferences, projects,
and networking opportunities, well, I mentioned,
we offer member consortial discounts,
Pressbooks, I've already mentioned.
We operate a data site consortium for DOI minting.
So, DOIs are something that your library is looking at,
we can help with that.
And I've already mentioned that Open Education Network
and some of the other community benefits.
So, you might be tired of hearing the word community here
at the end of this presentation,
but it is really the community
that's at the heart of our work
and what powers the work of the consortium.
Our partners drive that work and they guide it as well
through our community governance models.
And we're driving each other
towards the accomplishment of our shared mission,
which is to propel the academic
and research enterprises forward
by protecting the digital scholarly and cultural record
and radically broadening access to it.
I think it's probably evident
that we're really excited about this work
and we want to engage in it with as many folks as possible.
So we want to hear your thoughts and questions,
and we're going to stop recording the presentation now
and hopefully get to hear
from some of you who are with us today.