DPLAfest 2017

Pick up your name badges and check in with friends before kick off! 
Remember the essentials:

1. Enter at 401 S. Plymouth Street to register
2. Grab coffee on the way
3. Start your day with fully charged devices.

Registration will open at 8:00 and remain staffed throughout the event. 

Join us for the kick off of DPLAfest 2017! This will include remarks from DPLA Board of Director's Chair Amy Ryan, Chicago Public Library's Commissioner Brian Bannon, and DPLA Executive Director Dan Cohen. 
This session will also include a panel discussion, "Telling the Stories of Who we Are" with three members of the DPLA and library community: Nell Taylor of Chicago's Read/Write Library, Jennifer Brier from University of Ilinois at Chicago, and Luis Herrera, City Librarian for the City and County of San Francisco. 

 

This session will feature a series of five minute presentations about interesting projects and updates from members of the DPLA Community. Presentations include:

Exposing DPLA usage stats through Google Data Studio
The DPLA aggregation model promises to provide more exposure to digital collections from a variety of institutions. But it also presents a challenge: how do we track and understand the full picture of usage of digital content, from the local repository on up through statewide aggregators, DPLA, and potentially other websites through re-use?

California Digital Library (CDL) has found one potential solution to this problem in Google Data Studio: a free tool for pulling Google Analytics and other data into a dynamic, interactive dashboard. This lightning talk will quickly introduce the concept of Google Data Studio and show the visualizations we have been able to create using the DPLA stats account.

Getting Quickly to a New Kind of Search on JSTOR
JSTOR Labs, an experimental product development group at JSTOR, has been working on a new form of search, in which users can upload their own document and search using that. Scholars can upload near-finished manuscripts as a way to complete a literature review, and students can enter the few pages of a work-in-progress paper to find scholarship they'll need to finish it. In this Lightning Round, we will demonstrate this new tool and the technology that powers it, as well as step through the "design thinking" and rapid prototyping processes that led to its development.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library Field Notes Project: digitizing archival material through institutional collaboration
The importance of field notes is well known to researchers and historians as they offer insight to expeditions, the habitats observed, and even the scientists themselves. However, since scientists may change institutional affiliation throughout their careers, their field notes aren’t always retained by a single repository. This makes it difficult for current researchers to access primary material produced by a single scientist or expedition. The Biodiversity Heritage Library Field Notes Project is a two-year collaborative effort to digitize field notes and make them freely available through the Biodiversity Heritage Library. This lightning round introduces the project, briefly explores some of the challenges we've come across, and highlights milestones we've reached so far.

Listening to War: Uncovering Wisconsin’s Wartime Oral Histories
The Recollection Wisconsin DPLA Service Hub is nearing the end of a year-long project to find and inventory oral history recordings documenting life during wartime, held by libraries, archives, and historical societies throughout Wisconsin. This statewide planning project, supported by an NEH grant, will result in a comprehensive plan to digitize, preserve and provide access to hidden, at-risk audiovisual resources. This lightning talk will report on the project's methodology, findings so far and next steps. Service Hubs and other collaborative digital library programs can take away ideas for leveraging project-based grants to expand and enhance their work.

Professional Opinion vs User Directed Digitization, Round 1
Cultural heritage institutions in the DPLA vary in their methods of digitizing one of the most unique historical objects: scrapbooks. The University of North Texas Digital Projects Unit seeks to clarify the expectations of its users by asking them how they would like to see scrapbooks represented in a digital space in digital libraries. In this lightning talk, we will share results of a web survey of DPLA partner’s methods and representation practices of scrapbooks and plans for usability studies on students, members of the public, and librarians. The final results of this study will include recommendations on how to preserve these artifacts digitally with users in mind.

Putting Principles Into Practice: Articulating DPLA's Shared Values
The DPLA team recently collaborated on a values statement that clearly articulates our principles and how they play out in practice. Recognizing that these values reflect both the current status and what we hope to achieve more effectively, we see this as a framework for our goals, our behaviors, and our day-to-day work. We'll share our process for creating the values statement, how we expect it to shape our work going forward, and how it has served to further a shared culture during a time of change in the team.

RE:VIVE Bringing together the world of archives and electronic music
RE:VIVE, an initiative by the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision is using the power of electronic and progressive dance music to engage new audiences and raise the awareness of archives, their rich collections the creative inspiration they contain. RE:VIVE works with artists and record labels to produce new releases that are composed solely out of thematically curated archival material and inspired by the historical context of said curations. This lightning talk will show how the electronic music community can be an extremely valuable and insightful partner for heritage institutions world wide and can catalyze re-use of open content and contribution to the growing cultural commons.

Repurposing the API for Public Interfaces
Service hubs like the Empire State Digital Network, the service hub for NY State, represent a second generation of DPLA service hubs - hubs that act as a metadata conduit between providers and DPLA, but offer no public-facing interface or reporting capabilities for adminstrative partners. This has proved to be a problem for some of these hubs. Many new hubs coming online now face similar problems. ESDN has been thinking about how to put DPLA API data to use as a solution. We'll go over some of the solutions we tried and what our thinking is now.

This session will offer an approachable introduction for metadata managers and digital library content contributors who would like to learn more about: metadata quality issues and metadata reuse, tips for partnering to improve user experience through metadata/data enhancement, and the how-to's of preparing local authority data for linked open data. The session will emphasize taking a collaborative approach and provide practical strategies for building metadata partnerships. The presenters will also share detailed information about a pilot project in Nevada to identify digital collections that had a high probability of potential links in the local agent (people and groups) vocabularies and report on results of the experiment.

Partners in History will focus on the collaboration between Chicago State University Archives & Special Collections and the International Society of Sons & Daughters of Slave Ancestry (ISDSA) to digitize ISDSA’s photograph collection of approximately 400 images of formerly enslaved African-Americans. Compelling, uplifting, and diverse stories of life in freedom, told from former slaves' point of view, are also featured. The collection preserves slave genealogy and African-American family history as passed on by survivors, serving as a permanent record to inform scholars and family historians in their quest to interpret the slave experience and understand the effects of its aftermath.

Speaking to partnerships between larger institutions and smaller community organizations to better highlight unknown histories, this session will discuss how these digital collaborations can help fill in gaps in historical narratives of underrepresented populations. Additionally, it will address how metadata elements were used to include and highlight data that does not always fit into metadata schemas, such as Dublin Core, and facilitate discovery, accessibility, and participation.

To view this session presentation, visit:
http://prezi.com/uet8wzzycsv5/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy&rc=ex0share 

In this session we will focus on ResourceSync, a contemporary, standardized, web-based framework to expose all kinds of resources (not just metadata) for a wide variety of use cases. We will briefly outline ResourceSync's capabilities and discuss some of its current use cases. These include resource discovery in IIIF-compliant systems, resource synchronization for Hydra-in-a-box and other repositories, aggregation of scholarly articles into the CORE repository, and the replication of evolving Linked Datasets. The session is aimed at managers, developers, and technologists that are working on digital library or repository projects and are interested in resource discovery, harvesting, and synchronization protocols. Attendees will gain a solid understanding of how ResourceSync can support the interoperability between library systems.

With the help of Institute of Museum and Library Services grants, The New York Public Library, DPLA, and public libraries across the United States are re-thinking traditional library policies and building new technology to make the libraries and their digital collections easier to access. Our goal is to break down barriers to library use so that more people take advantage of all the services that the library offers.

Since last DPLAfest, NYPL has launched the SimplyE app and helping public libraries nationwide adopt the tool. The Library Simplified team will give you an update on the progress of their project, as well as a demo of the tool. Libraries implementing the tool will share feedback on their progress and usage.

Advances in digital communication have changed the ways we receive and share data and information, market our services and products, and how we communicate with stakeholders. This session will examine the ways that digital communication and social media have altered the landscape and grown the impact of our work such as the ability to foster civic engagement. However there are often unintended consequences, especially as it relates to identity and privacy for the communities we serve.

Attend this focus group session and give your input and feedback on DPLA's new website design to design firm PostLight. 
Limit to first 25 people. 

An opportunity to attend an open Board Meeting of the DPLA Board of Directors. Agenda to be available shortly. 

South Hall is adjacent to the Winter Garden.  

The American Archive of Public Broadcasting, with generous support from IMLS and in collaboration with Pop Up Archive, has created more than 71,000 transcripts of historic public broadcasting recordings using the open source Kaldi speech-to-text software. During this panel at DPLAfest, we will launch a game called FixIt to crowdsource correction of speech-to-text generated transcripts. Panelists will also discuss potential computational linguistic tools and methodologies to enhance discoverability of digital media collections. The session will demonstrate the results of 1) our work with HiPSTAS at University of Texas-Austin, who have conducted soundwave analysis and pattern recognition on a sampling of content in the archive, 2) the output and of the speech-to-text tools including name, topic and location recognition, as well as the implementation of this data to aid in search and discovery, and 3) methodologies and workflows around crowdsourcing the correction of transcripts.

In just under a decade, Europeana the digital gateway to Europe's cultural heritage has been leading the charge to improve and guarantee open access to high quality cultural heritage for all. Along the way Europeana has had to handle many challenges including poor or non-existent metadata, multilingual access with over 30 languages present, and the transformation from a portal to platform with a keen eye on new audiences. This talk given by EuropeanaTech Community Manager Gregory Markus will present the challenges that Europeana faces and the tireless efforts of EuropeanaTech and the Tech community to ensure universal open access to Europe's digital cultural heritage.

In this session, panelists will explore tools, platforms, and strategies for using social media to share digital collections and engage public audiences. Individuals from selected institutions will briefly share their approaches to sharing digital collections content via social media, including factors such as: which platform(s) and tools are used, how featured content is selected, opportunities for cross-institutional collaboration, and how they monitor, engage with, and measure the impact of sharing digital content with public audiences via social media.

Incidents targeting underrepresented students have affected the UC San Diego campus. These recurring events demonstrate the need for conversations about how students experience these issues. To respond, the UC San Diego Library created a “living archive” -- an online collection and digital exhibit with a physical exhibit and accompanying events. It connects the voices of current students with moments in UC San Diego’s history to show how students experience this campus climate. It highlights awareness, provides a space for dialogue, and preserves and documents events in UC San Diego’s past and present.

To develop the living archive, this project required the expertise of and collaboration between multiple people in the library and in the campus community. This presentation will discuss the living archive concept and its application within this project, considerations for creating a living archive and digital exhibit (submission criteria, copyright, metadata, infrastructural and technical challenges), and lessons learned.

This focus group for DPLA Hubs will discuss current practices and future possibilities for metadata quality analysis and usage analytics, with a particular focus on the needs of aggregators. Your feedback will help the DPLA understand community needs and develop better services. 

Since its inception, DPLA has worked to determine how ebooks fit into its larger mission of maximizing access to cultural heritage materials. We are particularly enthusiastic about the role that our large and expanding national network of hubs can play in creating an expansive, open collection of popular ebooks (both public domain and contemporary). This working session will bring hubs, contributing institutions, and other stakeholders and thought leaders together to share ideas, offer feedback and identify future paths for collaboration. What collections exist within hub networks but need improved discoverability? What open access ebook projects could DPLA bring awareness to? What do patrons expect and need of open access ebooks? Participants will help shape open access libraries, with possibilities for further conversation including a working group to explore options and draft recommendations.

Hosting digital collections, such as those aggregated in DPLA, comes with a variety of copyright challenges. This workshop will prepare participants to address those challenges for the collections they administer. It will outline the various rationales, under copyright law, for hosting digital collections (e.g., materials are in the public domain, a rightsholder has given permission, or hosting the collection falls under fair use). It will also go over when it is appropriate to grant permission for others to use items in a digital collection, and how to use Creative Commons licenses and rights statements to simplify that work. In the second half of the workshop, participants will work in small groups on copyright decisions for a hypothetical digital collection. The full group will then reconvene to discuss those decisions. This workshop is designed for people who administer digital collections and have some previous experience with copyright law.

This presentation will focus on the results of a recently conducted survey of public libraries about their digitization activities, including their knowledge of and participation in DPLA. The results will be presented by library type from very small to very large. The fascinating results look at the state of digitization in public and state libraries including staffing levels, digitization by type, training, preservation and much more.  

Want to learn more about DPLA's curation projects and how you can get involved? In this session, Franky Abbott, lead on DPLA's curation activities, detail ways that partners and other external curators can collaborate with DPLA in the coming year. She will share DPLA's current strategy for public engagement with partner content and the principles that guide curation at DPLA and give a progress report on DPLA's current projects, Exhibitions and Primary Source Sets. The session will also preview new initiatives, including the creation of an interface for browsing DPLA by topic.

This session will help expand your view of the possibilities for increased funding and sustainability by providing a demonstration of Foundation Center’s new freely accessible Visualizing Funding for Libraries tool which maps philanthropic and federal funding for libraries and digital collections. You will learn how to search and see funding at the national-, state-, and local-levels and find out how to use network maps and partnership pathways to discover new points of connection.

Data visualizations such as maps, network constellations, and partnership pathways can showcase key networks of funders and recipients as well as individual grants which highlight what services and programs are winning grants. Demographic data can be overlaid to show what types of communities are being served.

In addition to learning about the data tool, you will hear about the best practices for securing more grants for your library and collections.

The Digital Tools for Manuscript Study project aims to build open, modular tool environments to support image-based scholarly research. Our work involves integrating Omeka, an open-source platform for digital exhibits; Mirador, a IIIF-compliant image viewer developed at Stanford; and VisColl, a tool for the visualization of book structure. Our specific objective is to situate these tools within the International Image Interoperability Framework. By making these existing and easy-to-use tools IIIF compliant, we hope to grow IIIF's capacity to share cultural heritage images and expose them to new kinds of inquiry. Our work on this project is guided by our team's broader digital humanities research and development practices. Audience members will learn about the IIIF specification and how it has been integrated into popular research tools using a collaborative and user-centered approach to development and design. Intended for librarians, archivists, developers, and researchers.

In this session, attendees will learn about the challenges K-12 teachers face when approaching digital collections and resources for use in the classroom, and best practices for supporting educators when incorporating digital collections into lesson plans and units. At Brooklyn Public Library, we have added programming to support teachers in their efforts to remain at the forefront of digital literacy and innovative lesson planning. Projects like our Teacher Lab and educator workshop series provide a space for educators, trainers, and coordinators to share their stories and brainstorm solutions. These teacher trainings and professional development opportunities remain key factors in increasing usage among educators.

One in three Americans have tattoos and Americans spend 1.6 billion on tattoos every year. For many, tattoos are a way to address difficult issues like war, loss, and cancer. The role of libraries and museums is, in part, to build understanding through stories, including the elements we're grappling with such as mortality, illness, and conflict and tattoos have proven to be a great way to broach those topics. Museums like the Field Museum in Chicago and online exhibits like WarInk have tapped into this with extremely successful exhibitions based on the exploration of tattoos and their meaning for individuals and communities. Explore issues of storytelling, appropriation, self expression, copyright, and collection/exhibit development with a diverse panel: a renowned tattoo artist, a curator from the Field museum, and a librarian that co-created WarInk, a digital exhibit that allows veterans to tell their stories through their tattoos.

Attend this focus group session and give your input and feedback on DPLA's new website design to design firm PostLight. 
Limit to first 25 people. 

Libraries nationwide are exploring options for acquiring and delivering digital content that leverage the power of libraries, deliver good user experiences, and are consistent with library values. It’s clear that libraries need to take a leading role in developing access to digital content at every step in the life cycle, from creation to acquisition to delivery and display. The IMLS-funded Library E-content Access Project (LEAP) is a national multi-library project working to solve these problems. This session will continue ongoing conversations around this work with grant partners and stakeholders, with focus on solidifying our group's mission and values. 

This un-conference session will facilitate conversation and collaboration among developers working with cultural heritage data. At the beginning of the session, developers will be invited to briefly talk about a project they are working on, including one thing they find promising and one thing they find challenging about the project. We will identify common promises/challenges and form breakout groups to discuss them in more detail. Conversation and hacking are both encouraged. At the end of the session, we will reconvene to share the fruits of our conversations.

This session provides an update on the RightsStatements.org project and extensive look at its implementation at Hubs and contributing institutions across the DPLA Network. Updates on the RightsStatements.org project will include recent developments in the project's governance, sustainability, and growth. Panelists, representing a geographically diverse selection of rights standardization projects from digital collections across the DPLA Network, will compare and contrast how each approached the work and its challenges. Each featured organization differs in operating structures and content types held, making their approach different by necessity. Each is also at a different stage in the implementation process, providing attendees with an array of opportunities for education and inquiry. Panelists will discuss metadata choices, development of training, and engagement with contributors. This session is open at all who would like to learn more about rights standardization projects from those who are on the front lines of implementing them.

Remember the essentials:

1. Enter at 401 S. Plymouth Street to register
2. Grab coffee on the way
3. Start your day with fully charged devices.

Registration will open at 8:30 and remain staffed throughout the event. 

This session will feature a handful of short 5-minute presentations about interesting projects and updates from members of the DPLA Community. Presentations include:

What You Told Us About Analytics
There is growing interest among GLAM institutions to improve the collection, analysis, and use of analytics data. Understanding current practices of peer institutions can help improve local practices and move our communities toward development and adoption of interoperable standards and shared tools. The DPLA recently surveyed Hubs about current practices and needs surrounding metadata quality analysis and usage analytics. We'll share preliminary results and next steps.

REPOX Redux: A Plan for Improvement
Many DPLA members use REPOX to aggregate content for harvesting. The program is finicky, out-of-date (the last update was October 2013), unsupported, and lacks important basic features. To resolve these problems, members of the Big Sky Country Digital Network (BSCDN) and the Empire State Digital Network (ESDN) propose making some much-needed improvements and updates to REPOX. The team will develop more robust logging and integrate the NCDHC DPLA OAI Aggregation Tools into REPOX, for example. In addition to presenting modifications and a features list, the team will be putting out a call to the DPLA community for other requests for other features and code contributions. The project will exist in a public space on GitHub and use the existing REPOX code base (also on GitHub) as a starting point. The team will begin the project in January 2017 and demonstrate their progress in this lightning talk.

IIIF Implementation
This talk will provide a brief introduction to IIIF and highlight the experiences of IIIF implementers. 

Seeing the Scene
Local community networks are the basis for what become "scenes". Music scenes, arts scenes and literary scenes among others are important parts of community identity, and foster a feeling of belonging and distinction. In previous decades, communication within a scene was based on locally produced print information sources such as newsletters, zines, pamphlets, handbills etc. These sources are now found in various archives, and are an important record of a scene's life. In today's age, communication is enabled via the Internet and social media. The open access Chicago Music Scene Web archive at Northwestern U is an experiment to discover if a scene can be represented in online archives with information gained via web harvesting. Attendees will see how important and easy it is to "see the scene" using web harvesting techniques. 

https://archive-it.org/collections/7253

TagTeam - Social Tagging in an Open Infrastructure
TagTeam is an open-source tagging platform with the power to move a tagging project from a folksonomy to an ontology. It’s an open infrastructure that supports interoperability and resource aggregation, developed by the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. This session will provide an overview of TagTeam and how it supports social tagging, controlled vocabularies, open infrastructures, and interoperability. To demonstrate how TagTeam works in practice, the session will briefly review the Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) as an ongoing use case. The presentation will also touch on TagTeam’s future goals.

Technology Selection for Texas - Beyond the Portal
The Texas State Libraries and Archives Commission has provided Texas Digital Library with a grant to partner with Houston Public Libraries and the University of North Texas' Portal to Texas History (the current hub for Texas) to develop a DPLA Service Hub. TDL surveyed a number of existing hubs across the country to learn about their experiences. Based upon peer feedback, the Texas Digital Library is currently implementing the Supplejack application from Digital New Zealand. This tool provides a GUI-based metadata aggregation and mapping service to visualize and simplify workflows for metadata managers. 

In this lightning talk, we will discuss our review of technologies and our selection of Supplejack as well as additional plans for development of a local discovery layer.

Improving Regional Metadata with the Western Name Authority File Project
In April 2016, the University of Utah received funding from IMLS for the Western Name Authority File project, a two-year planning grant designed to explore ways regional digital libraries can work together on issues of name authority control. This lightning talk will provide a brief overview of progress, which centered on collecting and evaluating baseline data from digital libraries in western states, collaboration with partner institutions, selecting a data model for the project, and testing tools and software to support shared creation and maintenance of a regional name authority file for personal names and corporate bodies. The talk will also explore how name authority control can improve discoverability for DPLA content providers in both local and regional aggregated digital library indexes.

The Indiana Memory DPLA Service Hub Approach: Metadata Aggregation on a Shoestring
Metadata mapping for a service hub is a complicated process. Learning about and negotiating the systems represented across a service hub to allow for aggregation can involve a wide variety of starting points and levels of expertise. In Indiana, a statewide service hub through the Indiana State Library has worked to create an approach to metadata aggregation for systems using CONTENTdm. For organizations not using CONTENTdm, Indiana University has also created a Metadata Mapping Tool that allows for spreadsheet-style data input that can be mapped to produce the XML feed that the IMDPLA needs to do its aggregating up to DPLA. Join us for a quick look at our approach to metadata aggregation as well as training for IMDPLA participants. We hope these comments will be helpful to existing or future DPLA Service Hubs.


Reaching Out to Potential DPLA Hub contributors: PA Digital's Communication Strategy and Plan 
As a hub, how do you develop a communication plan to reach out to potential new contributors in your community? And how do you keep current contributors engaged and up to date? Successful communication across different types of institutions and sectors requires some strategizing. PA Digital developed a plan to manage communication to the Pennsylvania community systematically, including social media, blog posts, email lists, webinars and in-person workshops. In this lightning talk we will give an overview of the development process of such a plan and some lessons learned from the implementation. The talk will include a URL to a template that we created based on our own spreadsheet. Attendees can use this resource as the basis for their own planning. 

 

This presentation highlights an IMLS grant-funded project that pairs five National Digital Stewardship Residents with Mentors in Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) partner institutions across the US. Residents will engage in projects to improve tools, curation, and content stewardship, and work with Mentors to develop methodologies useful for the digital library and biodiversity data communities. In this presentation, Residents will share their project’s goals and activities, and Mentors will discuss how the BHL NDSR program incorporates mentorship, service learning, and supports the future of design and management by training the next generation of digital library professionals.

This session focuses on the challenges of enforcing metadata standards in digital library projects, especially collaborations across a variety of contributors.

Good metadata is essential for the success of any digital project. Bad metadata frustrates backend administrative functions and user experience. Lax enforcement can easily create a “digital junk drawer,” where good content gets lost without quality metadata to organize everything and make it findable. When this happens, a time-consuming but necessary clean-up effort raises new challenges.

The presenters for this session will discuss these issues by drawing from their experiences managing Minnesota Reflections (MR) and the Arizona Memory Project (AMP), two databases of digitized collections contributed by cultural institutions (e.g. museums, libraries, archives, and historical societies) located throughout each respective state.

This session is ideal for anyone who wants to learn:
• Why metadata is so crucial
• How to enforce metadata guidelines
• How to clean up bad metadata

What if the role of the library moved from customer to discovery partner? Readers are faced with an expanding sea of choices from both the self-published and traditional. Join us to discuss how distributors, libraries, and vendors are working together to cultivate dedicated readership and deepen patron engagement. Through a partnership between vendor, publisher/distributer and libraries, the PopupPicks.com collaboration includes curation of indie-focused, quality digital titles delivered directly to the virtual hands of readers in a brand new consumer-friendly way. Authentication occurs through geolocation and eliminates any friction accessing the collection for the reader. The goals are to increase digital discoverability in libraries, drive book sales for publishers and connect readers with a trusted guide from the local library for their next great read. Participants will discuss initial user data patterns, consumer and library reactions and how publishers and libraries can get involved in this groundbreaking approach to library+publisher partnership.

This session highlights the best practices, workflows, and lessons learned to achieve successful, grant-funded, collaborative projects aimed at engaging the community with local history and effecting policy change undertaken by three representatives of the Digital Library of Tennessee, the Volunteer State's DPLA service hub. The place-based projects that rely on collaborative community partnerships to address social and economic justice issues through digital libraries include Middle Tennessee State University's (MTSU) Teaching with Primary Sources, the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga's (UTC) Chattanooga Women's Oral History Project, and Rhodes College's OutMemphis, Neighborhood History, and American Soul Music projects. Session attendees will learn tips to attract administrative support and funding, management strategies, and lessons learned to build their own community collaborations aimed at affecting positive change through the creation of socially-engaged digital repositories.

Hear what DPLA is exploring around innovative methods to advance the library ebook ecosystem. Public libraries and consortia encouraged to attend.

After nearly 22 months of design and development, the Hydra-in-a-Box project partners -- the Digital Public LIbrary of America, DuraSpace, and Stanford University -- have made demonstrable progress to extend the Hydra project codebase and to develop next-generation repository and metadata aggregation solutions, incorporating the capabilities and affordances to support networked resources and services in a shared, sustainable, nationwide network.

This presentation offers the DPLA community an update on all aspects of the project. We will show: how the input (through user interviews conducted with DPLA community members and others) was incorporated into the process of designing the repository and aggregator products; how the larger repository community has helped to shape and develop the repository software; a demonstration of the repository application called Hyku, including the ease of deploying it to the cloud; a roadmap for application development in the final year of the IMLS-funded effort; and the plans for offering a Hydra-in-a-Box hosted service called HykuDirect. Hyku and the other Hydra-in-a-Box project outcomes allow a greater number of cultural heritage organizations to sustain scalable repositories and provides an easier path to having content aggregated by the Digital Public Library of America and connecting with other networked services.

Monographs are increasingly making the print-to-digital shift that journals started twenty years ago, but many online platforms for monographs arguably do not take full advantage of the digital environment. In October 2016, JSTOR Labs, an experimental platform development group at JSTOR, convened a group of scholars, librarians, and publishers to unpack the design issues around the presentation of digital monographs. The group proposed a set of principles for reimagining the presentation of monographs in order to improve the user experience and increase the value of ebooks to scholars and students. The proposed talk will introduce these principles, which are outlined in a new white paper (https://labs.jstor.org/download/ReimaginingtheMonographWhitePaper-DRAFT+FOR+COMMENT-2016-12-12.pdf), and will address discovery, evaluation, and interoperability challenges of the current scholarly ebook landscape. The presentation will also include a demonstration of a new, open-source prototype that the JSTOR Labs group has designed: a topic-based navigational aid for monographs called "Topicgraph."

The Norman B. Leventhal Map Center (LMC) provides stewardship to the Boston Public Library’s collection of 200,000 maps and 5,000 atlases ranging in date from 1482 to the present. Central to its mission, the LMC strives to spark curiosity about geography, history, and the world. Their newly launched digital collections harness geospatial developments to engage researchers, educators, and general public library users interested in maps. The digital collection can be searched either textually or spatially using a modern basemap, georeferenced and annotated, and exported for use in more advanced GIS technologies. Educators can create new or adapt existing sets of maps for use in their classrooms, and LMC staff can more easily create online exhibitions. The project utilizes several open-source projects to enhance digital discoverability and use and the resulting code base combining these developments is freely available so that it can be adapted and used further by other organizations.

In an effort to address how descriptive practices fail to capture diverse identities, thus obscuring the impact and meaning of cultural difference, the GLAM community is increasingly attempting to address the need for inclusive and culturally sensitive language and metadata. With a growing focus on social justice issues and in archives and accessibility, discussions have recently intensified around how we can better apply descriptive terms to surface relevant material in the age of “more product less process,” and how to involve actively the communities whose collections are being housed by outside institutions. In the increasingly highly distributed environments of digital collections, the ubiquitous challenges around description, discovery, and access are amplified: In large scale aggregations like DPLA and Umbra Search African American History, materials that are inadequately described can be totally lost within a much larger corpus, as discrete records are unconstrained by and unmoored from their home digital repositories, often shedding critical intellectual context in the process.

This working session brings together thought leaders, diverse practitioners (including both coders and librarians) and the user community together to advance our work, collectively, towards identifying principles that might form the basis of a framework to underlie more inclusive description and discovery mechanisms.

This workshop will equip you with hands-on experience and community-created lesson plan frameworks to empower you to teach text analysis workshops at your home institution. After an introduction to text mining concepts and to the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) tools and services, you will collaborate in small groups to draft lesson plans that incorporate text analysis techniques. Representatives from the HTRC will lead the session using best practice in instructional design to guide curriculum development. You will have the opportunity to think through learning goals, “big ideas,” and requisite skill development for a text analysis workshop as you map out short lesson plans. At the end of the workshop, you with have the framework of teachable lesson guides you can implement in your local instructional practice. With your permission the guides will be assembled into an open community resource for others who teach (or seek to teach) text analysis workshops.

Now with over 25 million distinct concepts, many of them drawn from heritage communities, Wikidata, a sister project of Wikipedia, offers one of the most dynamic large; and what's more this data can be accessed and contributed to in over 100 languages. As a structured, linked, open, multiligingual data project, that is both machine and human readable and editable, its become a utility for communities in different knowledge professions and around the world.

In this workshop, I will provide the following:

*Introduction the assumptions and data structure behind Wikidata
*A demonstration of contributing to Wikidata
*Examine tools important for helping cultural heritage organizations contribute to Wikidata
*Show how querying and interacting with Wikidata can enrich knowledge from elsewhere.
*Highlight initiatives and opportunities to become more involved, including the upcoming work to changes to Wikimedia Commons funded by the Sloan Foundation.

The workshop will start at the basics, and highlight the broader opportunities and conversations possible because of Wikidata. No experience with linked-structured open data is needed.

An enduring activity in the print world, annotation has been slow to catch on in a siloed and device-fickle digital environment. However, conversations and communication via annotations can offer improvements in scholarly communication workflows and reader engagement, as well as student learning outcomes. Michigan Publishing worked with Hypothes.is to explore ways annotation could increase post-publication reader engagement; improve pre-publication workflow; and impact classroom learning. Rebecca Welzenbach of the University of Michigan Library will discuss implementation across select books and journals; hosting of a collaborative reading and annotation event during Open Access Week; and community workshops to explore use of annotation in the classroom. Arti Walker-Peddakotla, Product Manager for Hypothes.is, will share numerous classroom annotation experiments that are informing pedagogy and highlighting the value of creating an open, interoperable, and standards-based annotation framework. Attendees with an interest in library publishing and in classroom support will find much of interest.

This presentation will explore the process of evaluating, disrupting, and re-envisioning an evolving technology project because sometimes the most promising of ideas encounter real-world limitations. Yet, accepting that radical change is required opens up the possibility of finding new and better approaches to solving our common problems. The DPLA technology team has recently changed course in its project to overhaul our ingestion infrastructure, scaling back our use of LDP/triplestore models and technologies, and embracing those of big data and data science. Our new system is modular and optimized for distributed batch processing. Throughout the process, we engaged with critical questions relevant to anyone doing the difficult work of innovation.

This session will look at the active role that libraries are playing in strengthening communities through digital projects focused on cultural heritage and cultural equity. Not only are libraries increasingly agents of social change in local communities, but they are also using methods to measure social impact in a variety of ways. We'll hear from projects taking place in 1000 public libraries across Colombia through the National Library of Colombia, in Native American libraries across New Mexico, and how several librarians started the Libraries 4 Black Lives project. Additionally, we'll hear how the Public Library Association's Project Outcome is providing free measurement tools to public libraries across North America, and how DPLA is working with Historypin to pilot measurable public library programs in rural US communities.

An opportunity for members of the DPLA Community Reps program to meet and chat with each other and DPLA staff over lunch. South Hall is adjacent to the Winter Gardens. 

Amistad Research Center has made many of its social justice themed collections, dating back to 1840s, available online. This session will describe the process through which these collections were digitized and made available. Speakers will discuss the steps taken, from selecting collections of material for digitization, to the creation of digitization and metadata workflows. The audience will learn a bit about the challenges of bringing centuries old material into the digital age as well as integrating contemporary, born digital material into an archival setting. The session will also touch on the importance of engaging with current social justice movements while providing access to historical movements.

In recent years, the Art Institute of Chicago has invested heavily in nine digital scholarly catalogues on topics ranging from Roman art to modern art. The freely available catalogues offer in-depth curatorial and conservation research supported by interactive features that give readers the power to investigate on their own.

In the midst of a museum-wide digital infrastructure overhaul, Art Institute librarians, publishers, and technologists are asking deeper questions about digital scholarly publishing: how useful are the catalogues? Who is reading them? How are these readers finding the catalogues? Are current formats working? Where do digital publishing and broader digital restructuring efforts intersect? How can we reach a wider audience of librarians, students, and educators?

Using our experience producing, promoting, and analyzing use of our digital scholarly catalogues as a starting point, we hope to engage attendees in an in-depth and lively discussion about digital scholarly publishing.

Hacking Hemingway Cracking the Code to the Vault is a digital history project that delivers unprecedented public engagement and access to rare archives from both the Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park and the Oak Park Public Library.

During the project, the LYRASIS consultant facilitated a cooperative agreement between the Foundation and the Library. The agreement includes the renegotiation of access to collections and outlines the implications of use when something is digitized.

Based on the success of the digital program and the collaboration in the community Special Collections has been able to fund a full-time Archivist and Curator for the first time.

Participants will leave this session with practical tips about community collaboration, training and digital planning and infrastructure. We will discuss lessons learned with a focus on life-cycle development and how a small staff managed the preservation of physical objects and re-gained intellectual control before starting digitization.

Attendees are invited to learn how to recruit, manage and train volunteers for critical library services. Presenters will share their tools, strategies and methods as well as the lessons they have learned in working with diverse volunteers for HathiTrust User Support and the HathiTrust Copyright Review Program. In contrast to many initiatives where participants can devote time, effort, and commitment as they are able, volunteers in these programs must meet productivity requirements, produce quality work, and provide consistent service. Although HathiTrust operates at a large scale, institutions of various sizes will have takeaways that can be applied to their own volunteer programs.

As information professionals, we know simple database searches are imperfect. With rich and expansive digital collections, patrons may not find content that is buried in a long list of results. So, how do we improve discovery of pertinent materials and offer serendipitous experience? Following the example of recommendation functionality in online applications like Netflix, we have developed a recommendation function for our digital library system that provides relevant content beyond the narrow scope of patrons' original search parameters. This session will outline the reasoning, methodology, and design of the recommendation system as well as preliminary results from implementation.

Whether your institution is a hub, content partner, or exploring possibilities, the challenges of operating efficiently and effectively in a collaborative environment are undoubtedly familiar: How do we decide between best practices and “good enough?” How do we translate between the dialect of digital libraries and the languages of more traditional library environments? And how do we provide centralized infrastructure while still supporting local community projects? Thankfully, there are concrete and critical steps to take toward managing and sustaining these relationships to promote inclusion, professional literacy, and common purpose.

Join our presenters as they discuss collaborations between libraries across different professional sectors, including public, state, and academic institutions. Attendees will gain insight into the many issues that collaborations across sectors raise, and will leave with new tools for anticipating and managing these delicate but important relationships.

Attend this focus group session and give your input and feedback on DPLA's new website design to design firm PostLight. 
Limit to first 25 people.