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 TDR Steering Committee Annual Meeting provides a dedicated in‑person working session for committee members to review progress, conduct business, and define strategic priorities for the coming year. This session allows members to assess user and member activity within the Texas Data Repository, evaluate ongoing initiatives, address challenges, and identify opportunities for growth and community engagement. Discussion topics will include operational updates, review of repository metrics, coordination around member needs, planning for upcoming enhancements, and voting on action items.

This meeting is intended for TDR Steering Committee members and their institutional colleagues who support TDR operations. Guests may be admitted on an ad hoc basis with approval from the committee, but only official committee members will vote. As a working meeting, the session will focus on discussion, collaboration, and decision‑making rather than formal presentations or lectures.

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

Whittle While You Work: Streamlining Digitization Workflows and Taming Transfers
By: Kristin Clark

Two years ago, TWU Libraries began overhauling its thesis and dissertation digitization workflow, moving from the slow dance of scanning bound volumes to the quickstep of feeder scanning. But why stop there? With each volume literally in our hands for debinding, we decided it was time to tackle the elephant in the room: unnecessary duplicates that would just become piles of loose paper.

This presentation will walk you through our journey: figuring out what actually counts as a duplicate (spoiler: lots of inventorying!), building a collaborative workflow with our cataloging and special collections colleagues, and—the real plot twist—applying our new process to transferred theses and dissertations. You know the ones: those boxes that appear after a fateful phone call from a campus department saying, ""Hello! We're cleaning out our conference room and found a lot of theses and dissertations. Would the library take those?"" (The answer is always yes, followed by mild panic.)

Come learn how we turned chaos into process, began shrinking our collection, and made peace with the transferred materials that show up at our door.

Are We the Bots? Exploring Tools to Automate Digital Archiving Tasks
By: Daniella Flores, Kristin Law, Vic Rocha & Elliot Williams

For a decade, UT San Antonio photographers sought a way to transfer their digital archive to the University Archives. The lead photographer donated burned CDs, DVDs, and eventually even a desktop computer with an obsolete asset management system, 400,000 images, keyword metadata, and the password written on a post-it note.  
Archivists needed a better way to transfer this rich archive of university history. We wanted one definitive copy—and corresponding metadata—to ingest into our digital preservation workflow, allowing us to de-accession the duplicate copies.  

Possessing only novice programming skills, the project team (two archivists, a metadata librarian, and a digital asset manager) had the wild idea that we could piece together basic scripts to utilize the API for PhotoShelter, the current cloud-based digital asset management platform where the collection is stored.  

Through experimentation, we built a sequence of necessary tasks, then developed automated tools to optimize the workflow, utilizing skills we already had and new tools that we could learn.  In other words: we became the bots!  

In this presentation, we identify the tools employed, including Open Refine, Python, and the PhotoShelter API, and discuss the expertise each member brought to the project. We explore how we inventoried, downloaded, ingested, and preserved more than 2 Terabytes of born-digital photos. We plan to use this workflow in the future to continue transferring expired assets from the public collection. We hope our presentation will provide other digital librarians with confidence to explore various tools, programming languages, and team collaboration in their environments. 

Prerequisite knowledge or experience for attendees: Intermediate: Session is designed for attendees who have a basic understanding of the topic and some prior experience. It will build on core concepts and introduce more complex applications.

This GIS Birds-of-a-Feather session is meant to provide an opportunity for TCDL attendees to learn more about the GIS Interest Group and the work and focus of the group. This includes GIS, mapping, GIS tools, AI, working with Faculty and students, and more. The session will provide an opportunity to network with librarians/specialists or others interested in GIS/mapping and working in similar fields and to have an opportunity to ask questions or listen to discussion about current projects or activities from different institutions. One such project is the Georeference-A-Thon taking place later this summer that all can virtually attend. Come and learn more about the new resource that will be used at this event and hear about the other types of events and direction the group is hoping to take to reach more of the needs of librarians and staff/faculty working with GIS, mapping, and other similar areas.

Co-author: Kristina Claunch, Research and Instruction Librarian, Sam Houston State University

TCDL will provide snacks and beverage service.

Harmful content and description, from offensive language in the catalog to visually graphic media in digital collection portals, can be a sensitive, emotional, and complex topic to tackle ethically on your own. The Harmful Content and Description interest group fosters an environment in which digital library practitioners are supported by cross-collaboration, understanding, and care.

In this session, Harmful Content and Description interest group members will gather to discuss best practices related to harmful content, harmful description, reparative metadata, and related topics. We will discuss current initiatives undertaken, as well as identify creative strategies and collective solutions to support our community and sustain the work we all do. Come prepared to build together the best practices zone and share relevant resources!

Multidisciplinary Research Proposal Enhancements through Large Language Models
By: James Creel, Daniel Xiao & Ethel Mejia

Following a TAMU Libraries directive to prepare for disruptions posed by emerging Generative AI technologies, the Office of Scholarly Communications developed a plan to use Scholars@TAMU profiles—supplemented with data on grant funding and other initiatives—as inputs to a Large Language Model (LLM) for identifying serendipitous collaboration opportunities.

Despite growing expectations for forming crosscutting collaborations, research development units often struggle to proactively form multidisciplinary teams. Research Information Management Systems (RIMS) contain rich, structured data on faculty expertise, but are rarely leveraged for systematic researcher matchmaking. Our LLM-supported workflow addresses this gap by integrating RIMS data into a proactive and transparent mechanism for surfacing interdisciplinary connections.

The workflow proceeds in three stages: (1) extracting relevant Scholars@TAMU profiles based on keywords associated with a research opportunity; (2) submitting profile data and contextual information to an LLM using a tailored prompt to generate potential collaborations and recommended actions; and (3) curating these outputs for possible dissemination to researchers. The workflow remains experimental, and key questions remain regarding its robustness, integrity, and value for scholarly communications.

We are designing experimental scenarios to evaluate the utility and reliability of this workflow. This includes defining profile sets and query variants, identifying suitable LLM platforms, and accounting for the probabilistic nature of LLM outputs through redundant runs. We aim to validate the methodology in partnership with researchers willing to engage with the generated recommendations. In this presentation, we will share our methodology, preliminary results, and any code or related resources.

Building A Removable Media Workstation For Accessing Floppy Disks and More
By: Rose Goldey

Like most archives and special collections, Texas State University hold born-digital materials stored on legacy removable media such as CD and DVDs, external hard drives, and floppy disks. However, the institution has historically lacked experience or workflows on how to recover, reformat, and access their contents.

This lightning talk describes the development of an air-gapped removable media workstation from initial conversations in early 2024 to a fully-working system in late 2025. Topics included are; configuring a standalone system outside the institutional network, establishing basic handling and documentation practices, and evaluating tools for different media types. The talk highlights early work with optical media, including CD and DVD ripping, as well as the challenges encountered when attempting to recover data from floppy disks.

One of the biggest pushes for this removable media workstation was the ability to access floppy disks. Initial work with USB-floppy drives allowed access to the disks, but showed errors and incomplete data. The solution was the use of a Greaseweazle floppy disk controller to enable flux-level imaging. Rather than presenting this tool as a universal solution, the talk discusses the ongoing process of refining our born-digital workflows.

The presentation concludes with discussion of future directions, including expanded digital processing workflows, continued learning around floppy disk repair and restoration, and the ongoing development of sustainable, defensible practices for born-digital archival materials.

Lab Band Digital Debut: Digitizing UNT’s Jazz Sheet Music Library
By: Steven Sellers & Marcia McIntosh

Since the inception of the University of North Texas’ Jazz Studies program in the late 1940’s, students and alumni have contributed to its rich musical history in the form of original student arrangements played by the world famous and Grammy nominated “Lab Bands”. Over 75 years later, the collection of arrangements continues to grow, currently reaching a staggering eight thousand charts. After years of aspirations to digitize this collection, in early 2025 an opportunity has presented itself by way of collaboration between the College of Music, the UNT Music and Digital Libraries, and the founders of the Sherman Jazz Museum. While the project is still underway, this lightning talk will discuss the process of the first few phases of the project, with particular focus aspects like scope, collaboration, project management tools, and creative solutions for digitization challenges encountered while working on such a unique collection.

Bridging the Feedback Gap: Institutional Repository Training for Non-Institutional Repository Staff
By: Whitney Johnson-Freeman & Viktoriia Savchenko

At the University of North Texas Libraries, the institutional repository (IR) currently uses a mediated deposit that relies on submitters emailing their file along with some basic metadata. This process is meant to be a low barrier to contributing to the IR, and it enables the IR support team to easily communicate with individuals as they submit their work. However, it also means that there is some variation in the submission process, and this variation creates some challenges for the IR support team that slows their workflows down. Updates needed to be made to submission guidelines and outreach material, but the IR support team wanted to do it in an informed way. The IR support team decided to create an interactive workshop where library staff and student employees could get the opportunity to learn about the IR, get firsthand experience in digital preservation, and create their own metadata. Workshop attendees are then asked to share feedback with their new, more informed perspective, and the IR support team can use their feedback to improve their guidelines and outreach material. The goal is to have perspectives outside of the IR help bridge the gap between what the IR needs and how the support team communicates these needs. This presentation provides an overview of the workshop, the development process, and the outcomes so far.

Prerequisite Knowledge: Intermediate: Session is designed for attendees who have a basic understanding of the topic and some prior experience. It will build on core concepts and introduce more complex applications.

Piloting a New PID: Exploring Implementation of Research Activity IDs (RAiDs) at UT Austin
By: Bryan Gee & Michael Shensky

A wide range of persistent identifiers (PIDs) exist for scholarly research, from DOIs for diverse research outputs, to ORCIDs for individuals, to RORs for institutions. Each of these different PID types helps to ensure that research outputs are Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR). However, there has long been an absence of an established and internationally accepted standard PID for research projects that can interoperate with other PIDs to help facilitate linking and centralization of information about related research project elements. To address this gap, the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) has recently developed RAiD (Research Activity Identifier), a PID designed to identify, track, and share information about research projects and their associated outputs. RAiD is already established in Australia and is now being piloted in the U.S., with the University of Texas at Austin participating as a pilot organization. This presentation will provide an overview of RAiD and the current pilot implementation being explored by UT Austin with respect to publication of research data in the Texas Data Repository (TDR). We will also discuss potential challenges to growing the use of RAiDs, and describe prospects for future expansion of the implementation of this PID.

Integrating Handle.net into Digital Asset Management for Persistent Identifiers
By: J.J. Bennett

In mature digital repository ecosystems, persistent identifiers (PIDs) are the connective tissue between storage, metadata, and public access. This talk describes our custom deployment of a Handle.net server paired with a Django REST Framework wrapper API, and how we’re integrating that PID service into our DAMS platform to make identifier assignment reliable, automatable, and operationally scalable.

We run a containerized Handle.Net v9.3.1 server in Kubernetes, alongside a separate Django API pod that provides a stable programmatic interface for the rest of our ecosystem. The Django layer encapsulates Handle administration and handle CRUD operations (create, update, delete, resolve) using a purpose-built Java entrypoint (HandleWrapper) and securely managed server configuration and keys. This approach gives us a clean boundary: Handle remains the authoritative PID store, while Django provides authentication, request validation, auditability, and a developer-friendly API surface.

A central theme is “batch semantics without batch servers.” Handle itself is optimized for single-handle operations; large-scale workflows are orchestrated in Django using Celery: ingest pipelines enqueue jobs, tasks fan out into individual handle operations, results are tracked per handle, and retries/throttling protect the service from overload. We’ll show how this design integrates with DAMS components (Fedora6 object storage, IIIF manifest generation, Elasticsearch indexing, and downstream portals), enabling consistent PID minting and updates as assets move through ingest, publication, and long-term preservation.

The outcome is a PID service that behaves like first-class infrastructure: observable, testable, and aligned with modern repository automation patterns—while remaining standards-based and interoperable through Handle.

Some familiarity with the role of persistent identifiers is assumed; otherwise no preliminary knowledge is necessary. UTL plans to open-source our implementation; some technical knowledge is necessary to adopt our example but that is not within the scope of this presentation.

TCDL will provide snacks and beverage service.

Making Metadata Input Accessible: Training Volunteers & Practicum Students for the Sherwin Carlquist Project
By: Samantha Ekberg

At the Botanical Research Institute of Texas, there is a small team working on the intimidatingly large National Science Foundation grant, ""Collaborative Research: Advancing the Extended Specimen Network: Curating and Digitizing the Sherwin Carlquist Collection""; a collection containing nearly 200,000 archival objects to arrange, rehouse, digitize, upload, and describe.

Without the volunteers and practicum students dedicating their time and energy to describing these digitized items, this project would likely go undescribed and inaccessible for years. However, describing archival objects is often complicated, and this particular project comes with extra quirks (such as lost field documentation, difficult to read handwriting, and linkages to another portal) that required the project team to constantly adapt the training, workflow documentation, and quality checking processes to make the activity accessible to anybody who wanted to try.

This presentation will give an overview of the way we currently train our metadata workers and the quality checking process, as well as describing the adaptations made over time to accommodate and work with both hired practicum students and volunteers. There will also be a detailed look at the current versus the several previous versions of the metadata training and reference documents, used in training and as working guides for the metadata workers.

We will discuss why and how these changes were made in the documentation, training, and quality checking process; the lessons we've learned and their effect on the rest of the project; and the joy in making a complicated activity accessible to anyone.

Practical Approaches for Training Student Library Employees in Metadata Creation
By: Sarah Lynn Fisher

The University of North Texas Libraries Digital Libraries Division employs approximately a dozen students each semester who participate in the description of digital objects for our items in our repositories. Through a thoughtful training approach, our division has been able to rely upon students to consistently create high-quality metadata for our collections. This provides a sustainable solution to scale our operations beyond the capacity of full-time staff, while also creating professional development experiences for students from a variety of disciplines. Many of the students start having little to no experience creating metadata or knowledge of the principles of information organization. After many years of refining the process, we will share our best practices for training novice metadata creators in a manner that emphasizes building knowledge field by field, allows for iterative refinement over time, and cultivates syntactical thinking that translates beyond the library domain. The training workflow is supported by clear, well-documented general metadata input guidelines along with format-specific guidance for common resource types in our digital collections. To support multiple learning types, this material is presented in one-on-one, video, text, and peer-training formats. Editors begin applying these guidelines by adding or modifying specific fields in collections with existing metadata. And to involve all creators in the quality review process, we provide instruction on how reviewers can use in-house tools to understand the impact of metadata quality in our repositories. We hope that sharing these workflows will aid other institutions training staff and students to create metadata for digital collections. (All Audiences)

Co-authors: Hannah Tarver, Head, Digital Projects Unit, University of North Texas and Mark Phillips, Associate University Librarian - Digital Libraries, University of North Texas

How Libraries can Leverage AI to Help Researchers Find Joy in Research Again
By: Joshua Been & Millicent Weber

While research should focus on exploration and discovery, the joy of inquiry is often lost amidst a sea of tedious tasks and technical friction. In this presentation, we will demonstrate how academic libraries are uniquely positioned to reverse this trend by acting as the bridge between complex AI capabilities and daily researcher workflows. We propose that academic libraries should bolster AI literacy to demystify how AI works, teach the art of effective prompting, and design robust workflows that help to automate the tedious parts of research.

We will showcase this model through practical examples across the social sciences, humanities, and STEM. Case studies will include automating the tedious data extraction process for evidence synthesis projects and leveraging AI to handle complex OCR tasks, such as messy handwritten ledgers. We will also show how AI supports data analysis by suggesting methods, generating Python or R code, and interpreting results.

This session will demonstrate how empowering users with AI literacy allows them to offload the boring work. It helps them return to the creative and joyful heart of scholarship.

Integrating scholarly communication concepts into liaison librarianship
By: Colleen Lyon & Casey Ruegger

In the course of their work with departments, liaison librarians may be asked to speak or answer questions about scholarly communication related topics like open access, repositories, copyright, and OER. While many liaisons are familiar with scholarly communication issues, they may be unsure of good resources to point their researchers to or how to engage their researchers in these discussions. Many library resources are focused on “skilling up” liaison librarians on scholarly communication topics, but there seem to be a lack of resources that discuss examples of integrating scholarly communication into liaison work. The presenters will try to fill this gap by talking about the ways they’ve integrated scholarly communication concepts into their liaison work, and about resources they’ve created to make it easier for others to integrate scholarly communication into their work.

As AI-driven harvesting agents—also known as crawlers, bots, or spiders—proliferate, all digital repositories and other high-value content platforms maintained by memory institutions around the world are experiencing serious problems and feeling the strain. Increased and often aggressive crawling has led institutions to respond in a variety of ways: scaling infrastructure to absorb traffic spikes, playing whack-a-mole with IP ranges and subnets, and deploying tools to throttle or block unwanted activity.

This informal birds-of-a-feather session will bring together TDL systems administrators and staff to share their experiences navigating this evolving landscape. Everyone curious about bots is invited to learn about them, swap “bot battle” stories, compare mitigation strategies, and discuss what’s working (and what isn’t) as we collectively figure out how to defend our repositories—or at least coexist more peacefully with the bots.

This is an in-person meeting for the Web Archiving Texas Interest Group (WATXIG) open to all TCDL attendees. We welcome anyone actively engaged in or simply interested in web archiving to an open discussion about current web archiving projects, issues, and practices. We will also spend time brainstorming initiatives and training ideas for WATXIG to organize in support of group members and the broader TDL community. Through this meeting we hope to increase dialog and strengthen connections between institutions in Texas that are archiving the web.

Annual in-person meeting for the Open Access Interest Group. The meeting is open to all TCDL attendees.

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 annual in-person meeting of the TDL DSpace Users Group (DUG) is open to all conference attendees interested in the DSpace open repository platform. This year’s meeting will provide opportunities for DSpace users to share about their repository operations and challenges, feature an update on the status of on-going DSpace development at the global level, and provide updates on upgrades of TDL-hosted DSpace repositories.

The TDL DUG works to create an active community among DSpace users that facilitates mutual support for DSpace use and repository management; takes on collective projects for the benefit of the TDL consortium; and connects the TDL user community to the global open source DSpace community.