TCDL 2026

TCDL will provide breakfast.

Designated quiet room from 8 - 9 am.

Food is allowed in the classroom. Please be considerate of fellow attendees and keep noise to a minimum. Meetings are not allowed in this space during this time. If you have any concerns, please visit the Check-in table.

The Check-in and information table is open all day.

As the bridge that connects users to digitized archival materials, descriptive metadata is an important tool for resource discovery and access. For this reason, metadata should be as consistent and accurate as possible; however, achieving and measuring quality metadata is no easy feat. In June 2025, the University of North Texas Libraries' Digital Projects Lab completed digitizing and describing the Rosenberg Library’s Harris and Eliza Kempner collection, made up of personal and professional materials from one of Galveston’s founding entrepreneurial families, for the Portal to Texas History. This project is seven years in the making and includes nearly 67,000 items, all described by over 50 different editors. Naturally, quality errors abound -- from typos that were never noticed to outright changes in metadata standards and name authority headings over the years. But how does one handle the analysis and improvement of a collection of this size? In this presentation, we will discuss a short-term project to iteratively improve metadata quality for the Kempner collection using the model outlined in Tarver et. al (2022) “EPIC: An Iterative Model for Metadata Improvement.” The EPIC model—Evaluate, Prioritize, Identify, Correct—breaks down the formidable process of metadata improvement into smaller, more easily-handled tasks. Through the use of an “epic” color-coded spreadsheet, we divided the tasks into tiers that allowed us to "level up" when a section was completed, providing a rewarding sense of accomplishment with each level completed. This model can be utilized by other institutions in their large digital collections to iteratively improve the quality of metadata and ensure easier access by users.

Vireo Roadmap
By: Christopher Starcher & Frank Smutniak

As Vireo continues to serve as a core system in established ETD workflows, the project is entering a phase focused on intentional planning for long-term sustainability. This session focuses on the Vireo roadmap as a strategic tool and framework for ensuring the project remains technically viable, community-supported, and adaptable to changing institutional environments.

We will explore how upcoming development priorities are being shaped by future-oriented concerns, including stack longevity, reduction of technical debt, and architectural decisions that make the system easier to maintain, deploy, and extend over time. Planned work emphasizes modularity, clearer separation between core functionality and local customization, and improved integration patterns that allow Vireo to evolve alongside repository platforms, identity systems, and broader research infrastructure without requiring disruptive redesign.

Sustainability is also a governance and community challenge. The roadmap incorporates efforts to make contribution pathways more accessible, documentation more actionable, and shared development more predictable. By strengthening testing practices, release processes, and extension points, the project aims to distribute knowledge and effort across institutions rather than concentrating it in a few places.

Attendees will gain insight into how Vireo’s future is being actively designed, how priorities are selected, and how technical and organizational sustainability are being treated as first-order goals. The session invites institutions to see themselves not only as users of Vireo, but as long-term stewards of a shared platform.

Amplifying Student’s Scholarly Output by Registering References
By: Mark Phillips

Over the past year, the University of North Texas Libraries has expanded the visibility and impact of graduate student scholarship by integrating Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) into broader scholarly communication and citation networks. This initiative includes assigning Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) to ETDs published since 1999 and registering them with Crossref.

Beyond DOI registration, the Libraries have extracted reference lists from ETDs and deposited those references into the corresponding Crossref records. This step, which is a common practice for journal articles, books, and conference proceedings enables ETDs to participate more fully in global citation infrastructure. By contributing reference data, UNT makes dissertation scholarship discoverable through tools and services that power “cited by” and “referenced by” features across scholarly databases and open citation systems.

Although ETDs represent significant original research, relatively few institutions currently register dissertation references with Crossref. UNT’s work helps position graduate research on more equal footing with other forms of scholarly output while also increasing visibility for faculty advisors and committee members whose work is cited within these documents.

his presentation will outline UNT’s end-to-end workflow, including DOI creation, large-scale reference extraction from ETDs, metadata preparation, and reference deposit to Crossref. We will also discuss how this enriched metadata supports downstream integration with open scholarly knowledge graphs and citation services such as OpenAlex, as well as lessons learned, challenges, and opportunities for other institutions interested in similar efforts.

Co-author: Daniel Alemneh, Supervisor, Digital Curation Unit, University of North Texas Libraries

Navigating the Accessibility Labyrinth
By: Michelle McCrary & Rebecca Richie

Embarking on an accessibility audit of our digital collections felt like stepping into a labyrinth full of twists and turns, unexpected challenges, and enlightening discoveries. With little prior experience, we began this journey to align with updated ADA Title II requirements and quickly realized the complexity of the task. We made mistakes, backtracked, and revised our approach multiple times, but each step taught us something new. Along the way, we developed strategies for assessment, prioritization, and staff training. This session offers an honest account of our ongoing work: what we’ve learned so far, the challenges that shaped our approach, and the practical steps we’re taking to make our collections more inclusive. Attendees will leave with insights, encouragement, and ideas for navigating their own accessibility labyrinth.

This session is suitable for all audiences. The session is structured to be valuable to everyone, regardless of prior knowledge or experience with the topic.

From Individual Repositories to Collective Action: Addressing ADA Title II in the TDL DSpace Community
By: Kristi Park, Xiao Zeng & Susan Hoover

This presentation will provide an overview of the updated Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) Title II rule and its implications for digital repositories, as well as report on work of a Texas Digital Library (TDL) working group charged with developing resources for repository managers using DSpace.

In April 2024, the U.S. Attorney General signed a final rule addressing the accessibility of digital experiences under Title II of the ADA. The new rule requires state and local governments to ensure that web interfaces and content comply with WCAG 2.1 Level AA guidelines. For most public higher education institutions, the deadline for compliance is April 2026.

The updated rule has implications both for platforms that libraries use to host digital content -- like the DSpace platform used for TDL’s Digital Repository Hosting service -- and for the content that libraries host in those repositories.

In response, the TDL DSpace Users Group convened a working group in Fall 2025 to address compliance of the content contained in TDL DSpace repositories, and charged it with developing a collective plan of action for TDL members. In this presentation members of the working group will report on initial work to develop a content accessibility toolkit for repository managers and to conduct an assessment of current accessibility practice among TDL members. It will also report on planned future work.

TCDL will provide snacks and beverage service.

The Texas Digital Library (TDL) and The Portal to Texas History have partnered to develop the TxHub, a statewide service that aggregates and normalizes metadata from cultural heritage institutions across Texas and contributes those records to the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). Through this collaboration, Texas institutions are connected to a national discovery platform that now includes more than 53 million records from 44 content and service hubs, representing thousands of libraries, archives, museums, and other collecting organizations across the United States.

This Birds-of-a-Feather session will introduce the TxHub program and the collaborative work behind it, highlighting how TDL and The Portal support institutions in sharing their digital collections more broadly. The discussion will cover participation models, technical and metadata considerations, and the benefits of contributing to both the statewide aggregation and the larger DPLA ecosystem.

Attendees will have the opportunity to ask questions, share their own experiences with metadata aggregation and digital collection visibility, and explore practical ways to get involved. We will also discuss how institutions can leverage DPLA’s aggregated metadata for local discovery, research, digital scholarship, and outreach.

Read the abstracts for the lightning talks listed below here.

Passing the Baton: A Cross-Institutional Collaboration Developing a Digital Student Handbook for Professional Publication Standards
By: Kelly Drifmeyer

Optimizing Springshare’s Spaces for Enhanced User Experience
By: Damith Perera

Meeting ADA Title II through WhisperX AI
By: Corina Barr

From Shadow Workflows to Standard Practice: Making FAIRness Real and Repeatable
By: Andrew French

The Road to Joy is DAMmed: Managing the Bot Flood
By: Gio Gottardi

Join us for the next topic in the OJS User Group discussion series, Open Access in Practice. This roundtable brings together librarians for an open, collaborative conversation on policy development for open access journals, an important component for ensuring consistency, transparency, and sustainability in library-supported publishing programs.

In this informal session, participants will share experiences, examples, and challenges related to crafting policies for key areas such as authorizing new journals, providing support services, migrating or deprecating journals, and preservation. The discussion is designed to foster peer learning and resource exchange, helping attendees identify practical strategies and adaptable templates for their own institutions. Bring your questions and ideas; this is a space for community-driven problem-solving and actionable takeaways.

This session is open to all conference attendees interested in library publishing and the Open Journal Systems platform. No prior experience or familiarity with the subject is required.

Come get your headshots taken by photographer Parker Lunsford. Those interested can sign-up in the linked Time Slot Signup Form. A max of 5-7 people can sign up for every 15-minute slot. Walk-ups will be allowed if there are available time slots. Photos will be taken in front of a grey backdrop.

TCDL will provide snacks and beverage service.

New Horizons: How APTrust Developed a Community-Centered Technical Roadmap Process for Digital Preservation
By: Melissa Iori

This presentation will discuss APTrust’s journey in creating a new technical roadmap planning process. APTrust is a consortium based at the University of Virginia, dedicated to digital preservation and providing preservation storage across multiple geolocations to a variety of academic and non-academic member institutions. In 2025, our aim was to develop a new technical roadmap planning process driven by direct feedback from our members. Our new process included a comprehensive survey, focus groups, and data analysis. We were able to use the analysis from this new, feedback-driven paradigm to produce a robust technical roadmap organized into software goals, infrastructure goals, and security and risk management goals. As Lead Developer at APTrust, I am excited to share our process and answer questions from the audience about developing a technical roadmap for a digital preservation organization.

Preserving the Scholarly Web: Portable Web Archives for ETDs
By: Mark Phillips & Lauren Ko

Since 2022, the University of North Texas Libraries has implemented a new approach to preserving web-based scholarship cited in Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs). As with many institutions, UNT Libraries serves as the long-term repository for graduate research. For nearly 30 years, ETDs have included links to web content as part of the scholarly record. However, link rot and content drift mean that much of this cited material is now unavailable or altered, weakening the integrity of the research.

To address this growing issue, UNT Libraries developed a post-submission workflow that creates small, focused web archives for each ETD. URLs are extracted from submitted documents, crawled using a local instance of Browsertrix Crawler, and packaged into the portable WACZ (Web Archive Collection Zipped) format. These web archives are deposited alongside the ETD as supplemental files within the institutional repository. The repository interface signals the presence of archived web content and enables in-browser access through Webrecorder’s ReplayWeb.page.

This presentation introduces the concept of small, portable web archives as collection supplements, using UNT’s ETD program as a practical case study. We will share workflow design, tool choices, and implementation lessons, and highlight how similar approaches can help repository managers preserve web-based scholarship and enhance long-term access to locally held research materials.

Curious about what academic librarians really do day-to-day? This panel, “A Day in the Life of,” offers an inside look at the diverse roles within academic libraries. Featuring librarians from different disciplines within the library environment (such as reference and instruction, research services, cataloging and metadata services, etc.), panelists will share what their jobs entail, how they structure their time, and the skills they use most. New attendees will learn how these positions contribute to student success and scholarly work, as well as how librarians adapt to emerging trends like open access and digital scholarship. Returning participants can look forward to deepening their connections and expanding their existing networks. Whether you’re exploring career paths or wondering how your coursework connects to real-world practice, this session provides practical insights and candid perspectives to help you envision your future in academic librarianship.

Designated quiet room from 11:30 am - 12:30 pm.

Food is allowed in the classroom. Please be considerate of fellow attendees and keep noise to a minimum. Meetings are not allowed in this space during this time. If you have any concerns, please visit the Check-in table.

Hobbies develop skills that can be applied to real life situations, such as networking, researching, and managing complex collections. Work experience can also lead to discovering new interests that would otherwise go unnoticed. In the spirit of finding joy, this Birds-of-a-Feather will discuss how information professionals have cultivated and maintained their hobbies through their work while also highlighting the benefits in integrating those interests into their daily routines. This discussion is open to all audience members, regardless of their experience levels in librarianship and their interests.

The Vireo User Group Steering Committee welcomes Vireo users and those attendees curious about Vireo ETD to a community discussion about the system's current status and its future. Most Vireo users, whether hosted by TDL or not, have moved into Vireo 4. The Steering Committee is interested in hearing your experience using Vireo 4. Vireo leadership and developers are beginning to consider what Vireo 5 and beyond will have in store, so there will also be ample opportunity to provide input about new features, accessibility improvements, development refinements, and other changes to prioritize in the coming years.

TCDL will provide lunch. If you noted any specific dietary needs when registering for the conference, there is a meal waiting for you; talk to catering staff and they can assist you.

The TDL Imaging Interest Group would like to hold their yearly meeting. The meeting is to discuss current imaging issues, general topics, and future plans for the group.

As part of its strategic goal to increase its members’ digital preservation readiness, TDL launched the Peer-Assisted Audit and Assessment program to support two TDL members per year as they assess their digital preservation program in a particular collection, unit, or other definable area of work. This panel will highlight the work of the pilot group for this program from UTSA, TWU and SHSU. The pilot group consisted of a peer guide who had undergone an assessment in the past as well as pilot partners that she led through the NEDCC Peer Assessment materials to help them develop longer-term program goals as well as more immediate strategic objectives with timelines, stakeholders, risks and resource allocations. TDL’s liaison also worked with the Guide and Partners to document the overall assessment process so that it is reproducible with new partners each year. The TDL liaison and pilot partners will discuss their experience and refinements they made for the 2026 cohort.

All audiences: Session is structured to be valuable to everyone, regardless of prior knowledge or experience with the topic.

Hosting the Digital Humanities: A Project-Based Approach
By: Bryan Tarpley & Kayley Hart

The field of the Digital Humanities (DH) is a big tent that encompasses several disciplines that can be supported by a variety of functions and personnel from within the Library. This presentation explores a digital project-based approach to “doing DH,” one that focuses on walking faculty and graduate students through the process of creating public-facing engagements with their scholarship from start to finish by leveraging a small team and minimal budget. Drawing from case studies of projects developed at Texas A&M University (TAMU) over the past decade, the presenters will share how TAMU’s DH model addresses questions of infrastructure, sustainability, project management, and community building; laying out pitfalls and potential best practices along the way. At the heart of this model is a commitment by library personnel to shoulder much of the burden of writing code, designing graphics, and web hosting (particularly in the early stages) with the long-term goal of engendering the skillsets in stakeholders to take on the “technical debt” of their project. This approach structures library staff and the faculty/graduate students they support as collaborators, fostering a sense of shared ownership of the work and creating a tight-knit, welcoming community of plucky “DH’ers” willing to take on new challenges together.

Shared Curiosity and Cross-collaboration: Key to expanding Digital Scholarship
By: Karina Sanchez, Kiana Fekette & Yi Shan

Building a strong digital scholarship community requires more than tools and technology. It requires passionate and collaborative information providers. When the Perry-Castañeda Library Scholars Lab, a digital scholarship center, opened at the University of Texas at Austin, we recognized that its success depended on bringing together distinct expertise spread across the library. To foster a space where researchers could explore digital methods, we formed a working group that included subject specialists, digital scholarship librarians, and, importantly, digital stewardship experts. The cross-departmental team created the Scan Tech Studio. This group’s goal is to support responsible practices, research innovation, and creativity.

Over the past three years, these diverse experts have worked together to connect researchers with digitization, OCR, data management, and digital archiving workflows. The working group has created a space for themselves to learn new digital tools, create projects, and support campus researchers by providing small group consultations, in-class instruction, and skill-building programming. The team’s playful passion for their subject and their motivation to engage in outreach have led to imaginative collaborations and projects that extend across campus.

This presentation will highlight how our collaborative model, driven by shared curiosity, manifold expertise, and a common interest in outreach, has fostered meaningful partnerships and supported innovative research. Attendees will learn strategies for building sustainable, cross‑functional working groups, workflows, and programming that spark connection, encourage experimentation, and turn individual strengths into united impact.

TCDL will provide snacks and beverage service.

This meeting will consist of TCDL members interested in digital preservation. We'll discuss the following topics: current digital preservation environment, building capacity internationally, offsite storage, A/V preservation, and AI in repositories. Additionally, a co-host for NDSA's Levels of Digital Preservation will be in attendance to discuss the sustainability updates to the Levels. We will also look at the peer-assisted audit & assessment/task force on digital preservation services initiatives.

Since its launch in 2024, the Texas State University Open Datathon has grown from a small pilot into a multi‑campus event that engages students across disciplines in hands‑on data analysis, open data literacy, and collaborative problem‑solving. This presentation offers a three‑year retrospective on the Datathon’s development, tracing its evolution from the inaugural competition to its current expansion across both the San Marcos and Round Rock campuses. Using participation trends, engagement metrics, and qualitative student feedback, we highlight how the event’s structure, visibility, and educational impact have matured over time.

Across its three iterations, the Datathon has drawn students from a wide range of majors, including data science, engineering, business, health, social sciences, and the humanities. Pre‑ and post‑event surveys consistently show increased awareness of open data, greater confidence in navigating public datasets, and a stronger understanding of ethical data‑sharing practices. Comparing these survey results across all three years reveals clear trends demonstrating the value of hands‑on, challenge‑based learning for building practical data literacy and broadening student engagement with open science.

The session also reflects on the organizational lessons learned as the event scaled, including managing cross‑campus collaborations, coordinating space and technology needs, integrating hybrid participation, and balancing accessibility with technical depth. We discuss strategies that contributed to steady growth, effective marketing approaches, and the importance of strong partnerships with faculty, information technology services, the library, campus organizations, and local community.

Attendees will gain adaptable models, planning tools, and effective practices for designing and scaling Datathons or similar open data engagement programs at their own institutions. This proposal provides both a narrative of growth and a practical guide informed by real data and student‑centered insights.

Work in Progress: Alpine Restaurant Mapping Project
By: Betsy Evans Helesic

“What is there to eat around here?” is a common question heard in small-town Alpine, Texas, gateway community to the Big Bend of far west Texas and home of Sul Ross State University and the Archives of the Big Bend. This presentation introduces the Alpine Restaurant Mapping Project. The overarching objective for this project is to introduce a digital exhibit of Alpine’s past and present restaurants populated by archival research and crowdsourced data. Other than answering that perpetual question, this project holds interdisciplinary significance while providing an opportunity to further the ‘town and gown’ connection between Sul Ross State University and City of Alpine.

By bringing together historical data from Alpine’s restaurants into a user-friendly digital space, we tell the history and present – of our frontier region’s dynamism, our rural economy, and the people who come here from all over the world to make a home – and use that data when considering further questions, such as “What does it mean to run a successful and sustainable restaurant business in a remote and rural area?”, “What can future restauranteurs learn from the past?”, And even “How does the university community support the local restaurant community?”

The presentation covers work in progress including a literature review, the development of the first iteration map(s) using available historical data and open access tools, processes for crowdsourcing further data, and next steps. The project is in year one of three of web-hosting at alpinerestaurantmappingproject.org. This project is led by a beginner; Prerequisite knowledge not required.

Digitization Methods, Techniques, and Exploration for a Large and Historical Bible
By: Christina Kellum & Noah Garcia

The UNT Libraries Digital Projects Lab had the biggest task of digitizing a Low German Lutheran Bible from 1614 from the Patrick Heath Public Library in Boerne, Texas. This historic Bible provided the team the opportunity to push their equipment limitations, reimagine an older digitization technique, and collaborate with other departments and experts. The presentation will give an overview of the project's scope, breakdown the preliminary work done before the item arrived, share the ups and downs of working with historical materials, the full scanning and organization process, reevaluate what could have been done differently, and then finally the results of this project, including the timeline.

Captured Lakes and Landscapes: A Collaborative Effort to Digitize Two Film Collections
By: Bree'ya Brown, Marcia McIntosh & Christina Kellum

In July 2025, University of North Texas Special Collections was awarded a TexTreasures Grant to support the preservation, digitization, and access of two hidden, older acquisitions. Gathered from inside document cases, these materials included minimally processed coiled film strips coupled with negatives and Super 8 film stored inside shoe and cigar boxes from the Victor Oppenheim Papers. Additionally, the grant subsidized 4x5 film negatives housed in acid-free, clamshell boxes from the Bill Woodside Lake Whitney Views Collection. These film elements present unique still and moving images that captured Texas’s natural and architected landscapes, rivers, wildlife, and communities in the 20th century. The Digital Projects Unit lab took part in the digitization process, including the management systems and the digitization workflows done for both collections. They will explain inventory decisions, introduce the student team, and showcase the scanning equipment used in the lab. Additionally, a discussion of workflows and steps to transition materials back to Special Collection for metadata creation and publishing on The Portal to Texas History digital library. By intentional collaboration between two UNT Libraries divisions, staff from Special Collections and the Digital Projects Unit worked together to promote the preservation and accessibility of Texas cultural heritage materials. The TexTreasures Grant is provided by the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and the Texas State Library and Archives Commission (TSLAC).

Beginner Level