TCDL 2026

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.