2023 Texas Conference on Digital Libraries

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/2249.1/156776

After three years in the virtual space, the Texas Conferences on Digital Libraries will be held in-person, and we could not be more excited to welcome you back to Austin. Hi… How are you? As we reunite face-to-face, we’ll pause to reflect on all that has changed, especially ourselves and our workplaces, and forge a path forward together. Our work centers on increasing equitable access to digital materials, valuing the individual, celebrating differences, eliminating barriers, and providing space everyone can fully participate in. Let’s share how we work at work, how we work together, and how we work through challenges old and new. So, hi. How are you… really? We can’t wait to find out at TCDL.

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TCDL 2023 Conference Program
(Texas Digital Library, 2023-05-16) TCDL 2019 Conference Program
Conference program and proceedings index for TCDL 2023
GIS Birds-of-a-Feather
(Texas Digital Library, 2023-05-16) McNally Carter, Kate; Henry, Cynthia
Curious about mapping and geographic information systems (GIS)? So are we! Hosted by the Texas Digital Library GIS Interest Group, this Birds of a Feather session is an opportunity to share and learn about geospatial software, data, maps, and the role of libraries in providing infrastructure, access, and support. This will be a great chance for attendees to engage in conversation regarding a number of different GIS related topics that are of relevance to the library community including development of geospatial research support services, sharing of geospatial data from library collections, and organization of GIS training opportunities.
Developers' Birds-of-a-Feather
(Texas Digital Library, 2023-05-16) DeForest, Lea
Inviting all software developers, technology specialists, system administrators, and interested IT folk to convene for discussion, networking, show-and-tell, Q&A.
Imaging Birds-of-a-Feather
(Texas Digital Library, 2023-05-16) McIntosh, Marcia; McKee, Margaret; Clark, Kristin; Jones, Jerrell
Imaging Group BOAF, open to all TCDL attendees
TCDL 2023 Opening Plenary & Keynote
(Texas Digital Library, 2023-05-16) Park, Kristi; Bruxvoort, Diane; Leung, Sofia; Kellum, Christina
The Opening Plenary session includes a welcome from TDL’s Governing Board, the TDL Awards Ceremony, and the Keynote Address.
Poster Poco Loco
(Texas Digital Library, 2023-05-16)
Poco Loco (formerly Poster Minute Madness) is an energetic and fun session for all. Each poster presenter will be allotted up to three minutes to pitch their poster to the audience and at least 10 minutes for Q&A will be allotted at the end of the session.
A Pilot Study on Social Science Graduate Students’ Data Core Competency
(Texas Digital Library, 2023-05-17) Zhou, Xuan
Providing ongoing data management instruction for graduate students has become increasingly prominent in research projects. In Research Data Management (RDM), many researchers have identified different data management skill sets required for data curators, researchers, or students. Yet, literature does not provide sufficient evidence for determining the need for RDM training from social science student researchers’ perspectives. To our knowledge, few empirical studies exist that examine social science graduate students’ RDM practices. Understanding students’ experiences with research data and research data training, and their perception of RDM—identifying their data core competency status—can help develop a knowledge base for RDM education. Our research designed a pilot study for a data core competency measurement to examine how important data competence was regarded by social science graduate students and the status of their data core competence. Results demonstrated the importance of building an academic atmosphere where RDM best practices are valued in graduate social science programs. Additionally, we launched a pilot exam to evaluate students' data core competency using 16 questions to address each stage of the research data life cycle. Future studies on the development of standardized data core competencies measurement are suggested to build on our preliminary findings.
Learning by Doing: Interdepartmental collaborations to support experiential student learning
(Texas Digital Library, 2023-05-17) Clark, Kristin; Headrick, Elizabeth; Bender, Ashley
In this presentation, we argue that libraries can and should be central to the work of experiential learning pedagogies across the academy, regardless of discipline. Unfortunately, such collaborations do not require extensive faculty buy-in, which can be difficult to generate. Furthermore, the collaboration across departments can lead to obstacles in the development, execution, and completion of projects that center library resources. Drawing on our work collaborating across numerous experiential learning, digital humanities, and public humanities projects, we will explore (1) the benefits of incorporating libraries into the development and execution of experiential learning projects; (2) an analysis of obstacles that can arise; and (3) best practices for developing collaborative practices. Although our models are housed in humanities disciplines, we suggest that work such as ours can extend to the many disciplines within an institution, increasing interdisciplinary work among libraries and academic departments.
Changes in Hiring and Retention at University Libraries: Panel discussion with Library Administration
(Texas Digital Library, 2023-05-17) Holmes, Ramona; Bruxvoort, Diane; Mahoney, Jessica; Kellum, Christina
Hosting a panel discussion with Library administrations across Texas University libraries concerning the hiring landscape. Over the past couple of years, there has been a wave of librarians jumping from institution to institution or even from department to department. Gaining the perspective of administration of how libraries are handling these transitions amongst the Texas Landscape that would allow for collective ideas. Questions to the panel will center around recruitment, pay, retention, professional development, support, and sharing future action plans.
Machine Learning Tools for Audio-Visual Transcriptions, Captions, and Text Analysis in Digital Libraries
(Texas Digital Library, 2023-05-17) Hicks, William
Rapid advances in inexpensive or free-to-use artificial intelligence and text-processing applications now make it possible for digital libraries to produce affordable, relatively high-quality text derivatives (captions, transcripts, subtitles, translations, etc.) of many audio-visual (AV) materials held in repositories and expose these materials to a wider audience than would otherwise be possible. While not perfect, recently released systems allow for outputs that often meet or exceed the accuracy of text-based OCR, and natural language processing on these outputs holds promise for generating metadata or performing other research-oriented tasks. Members of the UNT digital libraries team will discuss recent work they have explored in this area, comparing the quality of outputs, costs with other creation methods, resource commitments, and demonstrate other lessons learned along the way.
Break, Drift, Rot: How Academic Librarians Can Weatherproof References in Electronic Theses and Dissertations
(Texas Digital Library, 2023-05-17) Anders, Kathy
Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) suffer from reference rot in a manner similar to other scholarly publications (Massicotte and Botter), but involve a greater breadth of librarian involvement in their management, dissemination, and preservation. Indeed, reference rot in ETDs in disciplines where students are citing “web-at-large” (Klein, et al.) material is a particular problem, in that web-at-large sources generally are not preserved and archived to the same degree as scholarly journal articles. Because of this, cited material in ETDs is prone to rot either from a number of factors ranging from links that do not resolve to substantial content drift. In an effort to mitigate reference rot in ETDs, a team of researchers from Texas A&M University and Los Alamos National Laboratories came together to consider how to address the issue through socio-technical interventions, melding technical solutions (permalinks, web archiving, and, ideally, Vireo integration) with human awareness (instruction to authors). This presentation will discuss the researchers’ in-progress work about how both types of interventions can be deployed at academic libraries to help create ETDs that are more resistant to reference rot. While the particular focus of this presentation is on ETDs, this presentation will intersect with topics in digital preservation and web archiving. Mia Massicotte and Kathleen Botter, “Reference Rot in the Repository: A Case Study of Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) in an Academic Library,” Information Technology and Libraries 36, no. 1 (2017): 11–28, https://doi.org/10.6017/ital.v36i1.9598. Martin Klein, Herbert Van de Sompel, Robert Sanderson, Harihar Shankar, Lyudmila Balakireva, Ke Zhou, Richard Tobin, “Scholarly Context Not Found: One in Five Articles Suffers from Reference Rot,” PLoS ONE 9, no. 12 (2014), https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0115253.
Much Ado About Open Ed, et al. in a Minority-Majority College: Faculty-Authored OER with Student Content
(Texas Digital Library, 2023-05-17) Ross-Nazzal, Jim
I’d like to discuss minority voices in OER, Open Pedagogy, and conflicting priorities. I’ve authored an OER US history textbook with student content. Students report that they prefer such an OER textbook because it gives them a nudge to perform better, study harder, think more critically. I work at a minority-majority college, so those student voices are of underrepresented students. I allow my students to write how the spirit moves them (within certain parameters) and so they tackle issues that interests them through their lenses, offering otherwise unheard-of perspectives. Perspectives that my current students enjoy reading. But this goes beyond OER to Open Pedagogy. That OER textbook with student content is used in my classes as the course textbook, to include the footnote material as springboards to new research, which is Open Pedagogy. Students report greater interest and greater self-worth. One messy problem we have is the so-called Equitable Access. Certain elements within the college are pushing EA, which runs counter to OER. We have departments that are 100% OER, yet if the college adopts EA, students will be forced to pay for OER in order to subsidize the cost of the dangerously expensive math and science textbooks. This is a fight we cannot afford to lose for our students and the faculty who author and use OER. My concern is that if students are forced to pay for OER, then fewer students and faculty will use OER. OER and Equitable Access have conflicting priorities.
Kiki’s Delivery Service and Lesser Prairie-Chickens: An analysis of dissertation related reference questions
(Texas Digital Library, 2023-05-17) Barba, Shelley; Barba, Ian
This presentation discusses a systematic review of six years of reference questions related to our electronic thesis and dissertation collection. We outline the history of the collection, our evaluation methodology, the trends over time, and the unexpected realizations discovered.
What's Behind Door Number 2? Discovering and Using Hidden APIs to Automate Repetitive Tasks
(Texas Digital Library, 2023-05-17) Hoover, Susan
At my institution, we have been working on a project to digitize approximately 19,000 theses and dissertations from 1940 to 2010. We sorted these into three batches based on the copyright laws in effect at the year of publication. For the oldest and newest theses it was a straightforward task to determine copyright status. The interesting period is 1978 to 1988, for which we needed to check each of 3700 theses to see whether it had been registered in the copyright database. At an optimistic rate of one lookup per minute, we were still looking at a week and a half of person-time to check the copyright status of this batch. In this presentation I will show how I solved the volume problem by using browser developer tools to locate and explore an undocumented API on the copyright website and by creating a Ruby script to automate the copyright lookup. I will also show how I modified the lookup as I learned the quirks of the copyright website.
ePADD: Email Archiving for Beginners
(Texas Digital Library, 2023-05-17) Banuelos, Chris
As electronic communication becomes more and more ubiquitous, what steps are organizations taking to archive and provide access to emails? Here at Rice University, the University Archives have been mandated to preserve all of the email correspondences from our newly outgoing university president. Since we've not done this before, we've started experimenting with a software called ePADD. This open-source software allows digital archivists and librarians to process email collections, preview the content for personal information that may need redaction, provide metadata, map the metadata to a local finding aid, and act as a point of contact for patrons requesting access to the content. After testing the software, we are almost ready to start archiving the collection. I'd like to take this opportunity to share with the community what I've learned from our ePADD tests. Additionally, since I've yet to formally begin the project, I'd like to ask the community to share with me any and all experiences thay have had with email archiving. My hope is that this session will be informational not only for the attendees but for the presenter as well.
A Digital Image Library: Making it possible with Facial Recognition
(Texas Digital Library, 2023-05-17) Prud'homme, Max; Peta, Lokesh
Ensuring the discovery and preservation of digital archival assets is an important aspect of digital curation work at the Oklahoma State University Library. In the fall of 2023, the university archives resumed their machine learning work after conducting a successful pilot project that explored the use of facial recognition techniques to curate a high-value archival collection. With support from Library Administration, the digital archives are moving forward with the development of a dynamic search engine, using machine learning, to improve the predictability and performance for searching thousands of digital assets. To achieve this, the team is constructing a model that is easily trainable and an interactive application to search images more efficiently. With consideration to scalability and sustainability, the facial recognition technology used in the pilot project is being extended to a larger and more diverse dataset of face images. The presenters propose to showcase the project flow, context, planning, design and architecture in a demonstration/tutorial-like presentation. They will address challenges and initial feedback, with a particular focus on scalability, sustainability, as well as ethical issues associated with facial recognition technology.
Completing Grant Work During Pandemic Times and How a Series of Unforeseen Obstacles Elevated the Outcome
(Texas Digital Library, 2023-05-17) Griffith, Arran
In 2020 the DuraSpace Community Supported Programs division at Lyrasis was awarded an IMLS Grant to develop, pilot and create documentation to provide Fedora 3 users a migration path into the newest version of the open-source repository software - Fedora 6.x. Originally proposed as an 18 month project, the program team and pilot partner institutions were faced with challenges which could never have been planned for, including a global pandemic which rendered some of the grant deliverables nearly impossible to complete in their original format. Through continual re-evaluation, community input, willingness to pivot and the unwavering support of the pilot project partners, and nearly 3 years later, the final grant deliverable was completed. The path to get there was not straightforward, nor without barriers, bumps and setbacks, but the final outcome was significantly more sustainable, accessible and thorough than originally planned. This presentation will discuss the roadblocks and challenges we encountered throughout this project and how we navigated the ever-changing landscape to reach the finish line. We will showcase the work produced via this grant and highlight it’s importance for all communities involved.
Development Support for the TAMU Libraries Transition to FOLIO – A One Year Check-In
(Texas Digital Library, 2023-05-17) Creel, James
At the start of January 2022, Texas A&M University Libraries went live with FOLIO for production library services, leaving aside the Voyager ILS that had been in production for 20+ years. The TAMU Libraries development team played a central role throughout the transition by contributing to the worldwide community effort of FOLIO software development, providing local solutions for data migration, and reimplementing TAMU Libraries’ suite of legacy services in the new framework. In the process, the development team experienced its closest involvement thus far with our librarian colleagues and gained many insights into practical librarianship. Migration of data from the Voyager ILS to FOLIO was a large undertaking that evolved over two years. On the face of it, this is the sort of Extract, Transform, and Load task common in information systems – but developers had to adapt to different database schemas and APIs as the FOLIO product was developed. Hundreds of trial migrations were run for different data types (Users, Vendors, Purchase Orders, Bibliographic Records, etc.) before the final migration that populated the initial FOLIO deployment. Reporting is a major requirement for any ILS and satisfies fiscal, accreditation, and analysis needs. Our Voyager infrastructure provided dozens of reports, mostly in Perl and SQL, that needed re-implementation. This process is mostly complete but is still ongoing. In support of reporting, we introduced two new FOLIO modules with the aim of enabling needed business process workflows for some of the reports. These modules are mod-workflow, which allows FOLIO to register and invoke workflows through an external workflow engine, and mod-camunda, a reference implementation in production at TAMU which interfaces with the Camunda workflow engine. For simpler SQL-based reporting, we are exploring business intelligence tools such as CloudBeaver and Superset. Spine label printing presented an interesting problem, as there was no integrated solution that shipped with FOLIO. However, ExLibris corporation has provided an open-source desktop application for use with Alma, known as SpineOMatic. TAMU developers wrote a shim called mod-spine-o-matic to allow FOLIO to provide Alma-like responses for bibliographic records, allowing SpineOMatic to work in the FOLIO context. Of final note are two additional services: MyLibrary, which allows patrons to manage their accounts; and the Get It For Me Button, which embeds customizable buttons in the VuFind catalog so patrons can request document delivery according to circulation rules. These applications were originally written to work with Voyager through a middleware service called the Catalog Service. This service formatted Voyager responses and data to be more easily consumed by our modern webapps. Happily, when we transitioned to FOLIO, we were able to modify how Catalog Service read data (from FOLIO rather than Voyager) and did not have to significantly modify MyLibrary or GIFM Button. As luck would have it, our historic ILS transition coincided with significant organizational changes at Texas A&M and career changes among many TAMU Libraries faculty. We will discuss our experience navigating this institutional transition at the same time as the FOLIO adoption.
ACRL Diversity Residencies as a Recruitment Method toward a More Inclusive Workforce, or Diversity Residencies: It’s Complicated
(Texas Digital Library, 2023-05-17) Thompson, Jeremy; Sanchez, Karina; Chamblee-Smith, Genevia; Oduok, Ima
For decades, residencies and fellowships have been a way to train early-career librarians in the practical applications of their MLS theoretical knowledge. They have been used as pathways for professionals from marginalized backgrounds to get their feet in the door of academic institutions. The ethics and efficacy of residencies is gaining attention as a research topic, particularly among former and current residents. With UT Austin, and now TDL, hosting the only ACRL Diversity Residency programs in Texas, how can other institutions in the state learn from their examples? How can other academic libraries implement residency programs of their own that benefit the host universities and the residents without tokenizing? This panel presentation will involve current library residents to discuss the practicalities and the experiences of diversity residencies.
Swag session: Publishing
(Texas Digital Library, 2023-05-17) Walter, Heather
Learn how to get published (non-academic). Visit heatherrwalter.com to learn more about speaker Heather Walter, UT Austin Tocker Open Education Librarian

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