TCDL 2026

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.