Accepted Conference Talks
This list represents the accepted conference talks that you can expect to hear at the conference. Thank you to all who submitted talks this year.
The 3D Herbarium and 3DExhibits4Learning: A New Student Powered Learning Platform
In the Fall of 2022, the Cal Poly Humboldt library presented a project as a capstone proposal for the software engineering class. That project was the world’s first 3D digital herbarium, an innovative new way to study botany. This digital herbarium features photorealistic 3D models of plants in addition to... more information about the talk The 3D Herbarium and 3DExhibits4Learning: A New Student Powered Learning Platform
Reimagining Harvard Collections: AI-enhanced Discovery
In the spring of 2024, the Harvard Library launched the Reimagining Discovery project, an ambitious initiative aimed at uncovering new ways to surface and enable discovery of Harvard’s vast and distinctive special collections. The first phase focuses on developing a platform called Collections Explorer, which leverages semantic search and generative... more information about the talk Reimagining Harvard Collections: AI-enhanced Discovery
Inheriting Messy Metadata: Acquiring an Institutional Repository from Non-Librarians
In early 2024, the University of Nevada, Reno Libraries began the process of acquiring the university’s Institutional Repository (IR) from a separate campus entity that was not associated with the Libraries. As a part of the acquisition process, the Libraries assessed the IR’s current content management system and metadata, migrated... more information about the talk Inheriting Messy Metadata: Acquiring an Institutional Repository from Non-Librarians
From Meme to Machine - How Our Gen Z Digital Preservation System has Come of Age
Establishing good digital preservation practices is a daunting task for many cultural heritage institutions. While this work is guided by several theoretical frameworks, there is no universal blueprint for how to employ them. At the University of Texas Libraries (UTL), we have maintained simple yet robust digital preservation strategies and... more information about the talk From Meme to Machine - How Our Gen Z Digital Preservation System has Come of Age
Fits and Starts: Onboarding into an Old Role as a New Leader
As digital library programs mature, more and more professionals will inherit positions with established staff, ingrained workflows, and long-running projects. How does an incoming digital projects leader maintain and adapt what someone else set up long ago as standards and best practices evolve, collaborators and their needs change, and organizational... more information about the talk Fits and Starts: Onboarding into an Old Role as a New Leader
An Introduction to Trankskribus: An AI tool for digital interpretation of historical documents
The Media Preservation team at Emory University has begun experimenting with the Transkribus tool, a digital interpretation tool used to analyze textual documents and provide transcriptions. Transkribus uses an AI approach that incorporates analysis models that users can train to better recognize specific line patterns and text format or handwriting... more information about the talk An Introduction to Trankskribus: An AI tool for digital interpretation of historical documents
We Fixed Monitoring, and So Can You! (Movie Narrator’s Voice: “No, they did not.”)
Can you fix monitoring? Not really. But, you can make it work for your team, no matter how large or small. In this talk, we’ll share how we evaluated monitoring systems, choose the best match for our team, and incorporated collaboration and scalability. We’ll describe our monitoring journey, from comparing... more information about the talk We Fixed Monitoring, and So Can You! (Movie Narrator’s Voice: “No, they did not.”)
“Wait, why are we doing this again?” Cultural humility approaches to metadata remediation
A common problem uniting digital library projects is messy, legacy metadata. Multitudes of presentations, papers, and posters detail how one has waded through the morass, cleaning metadata until it is usable in its new context. But how does one choose the methods or tools for these processes? What steps do... more information about the talk “Wait, why are we doing this again?” Cultural humility approaches to metadata remediation
Transforming Museums: Harnessing the Power of Digital Technologies
The rise of digital imagery and new technologies is reshaping traditional art galleries and museums. Many are embracing hybrid models that blend physical and digital experiences, acknowledging the value of in-person artwork while leveraging technology to broaden their reach and enhance visitor engagement.
How are curators and museum staff navigating... more information about the talk Transforming Museums: Harnessing the Power of Digital Technologies
The Dev & Designer Power Duo -- Secrets to Seamless Collaboration
Unlock the magic that happens when designers and developers work in harmony. In this talk, we’ll dive into how collaboration across the entire project lifecycle—from that first spark of teamwork—sets the stage for projects that truly shine.
We’ll break down the essentials of a great collaboration: writing tickets that actually... more information about the talk The Dev & Designer Power Duo -- Secrets to Seamless Collaboration
Replacing Digital Repository Infrastructure at Los Alamos National Laboratory
The Los Alamos National Laboratory Research Library recently completed a major effort to replace its legacy, 20 year-old, repository infrastructure. This project encompassed successfully deploying new repository software and implementing an entirely new information management ecosystem for LANL’s corpus of unclassified scientific and technical information (STI). Overall the work included... more information about the talk Replacing Digital Repository Infrastructure at Los Alamos National Laboratory
Making an accessible Winnie-the-Pooh
Until the recent implementations of the Marrakesh treaty, accessible versions of ebooks could not be shared across national borders. However, this prohibition has not applied to books that are in the public domain or have open access licenses. Unfortunately, less than 5% of the OA ebooks at OAPEN are accessible... more information about the talk Making an accessible Winnie-the-Pooh
Ensuring Institutional Repository Accessibility: Integrating Automated Accessibility Checks and Remediation Workflows
We will outline an enhanced Institutional Repository deposit workflow that includes new accessibility testing protocols, feedback mechanisms, and seamless integration into the existing institutional repository deposit process. This workflow includes integrated accessibility testing tools, allowing researchers to receive feedback on their submissions in real time.
By April 2026, all deposits... more information about the talk Ensuring Institutional Repository Accessibility: Integrating Automated Accessibility Checks and Remediation Workflows
Continuing the Conversation: Building Open-Source Semantic Discovery Tools
Northwestern University was recently awarded an IMLS Leadership Grant to extract an installable toolkit based on its recently launched open-source chat-based semantic search for Digital Collections https://www.library.northwestern.edu/about/news/library-news/2024/grant-supports-northwestern-libraries-launch-of-generative-ai-based-chat-search.html. We’ll discuss our work with Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) architectures, generating embedding vectors at scale in production, and the challenges of grounding... more information about the talk Continuing the Conversation: Building Open-Source Semantic Discovery Tools
Building my own tools: Creating reusable Python scripts for my most common spreadsheet tasks
This presentation will discuss how I, as a beginner/intermediate coder, created a set of easily reusable Python scripts in a GitHub repository to handle my most frequent spreadsheet tasks like merging, matching, evaluating, and cleaning-up data. It will cover common problems that have I encountered, from “what does this script... more information about the talk Building my own tools: Creating reusable Python scripts for my most common spreadsheet tasks
Bots Behaving Badly: How We Learned to Tolerate Crawlers Without Losing Our Minds
When your website gets swarmed by bots, it’s time to pull out the banhammer. But how to stop the next swarm BEFORE it takes down your site? Our library formed a team to tackle this issue and our findings offer practical insights for others facing similar challenges. Between Fix on... more information about the talk Bots Behaving Badly: How We Learned to Tolerate Crawlers Without Losing Our Minds
A search intent detection API: or, what if we tried to understand incoming keyword searches instead of just throwing the words at a search engine and hoping?
Have you ever wondered if there was a way to understand what type of search a user was doing? Have you ever considered what types of interventions might be possible if we understood a user was looking for topical information and not a specific item (or vice versa)?
Why MARC is terrible but brilliant and you should be nice to yourself
MARC must die, right? Certainly if you’ve ever tried to computationally process it, you’ve been frustrated by the not-quite-structured data, the ways it just doesn’t play nice with the expectations of modern applications. I’m ready to grab my best pitchfork and line up with you, and yet – if you... more information about the talk Why MARC is terrible but brilliant and you should be nice to yourself
Whisper speech-to-text for digitized historical audiovisual materials
There is significant activity in the cultural heritage community exploring the use of Whisper to improve accessibility of audiovisual materials. As a freely available model capable of automated speech recognition across multiple languages, it has the potential to enable institutions to create transcripts for large collections in a cost-effective manner.... more information about the talk Whisper speech-to-text for digitized historical audiovisual materials
Whisper at High Volumes: How to transcribe an Archive
The American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB) hosts over 200,000 digitized video and audio assets from over 200 contributing stations, across many decades. A collaboration between the Library of Congress and GBH (WGBH Boston), the collection spans over 100 years of media history.
Many records contain little or no metadata,... more information about the talk Whisper at High Volumes: How to transcribe an Archive
UTSA Libraries presents the Sounds of San Anto: exploring how digital tools can enhance storytelling
Sounds of San Anto is a project created at UTSA Libraries’ digital humanities hub, CEDISH. It aims to present several different datasets on the history of music in San Antonio, Texas, to general audiences, using innovative data visualization and application design. In this presentation, we discuss two parts of the... more information about the talk UTSA Libraries presents the Sounds of San Anto: exploring how digital tools can enhance storytelling
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck About Getting Things Done
Productivity advice is overwhelming, with endless systems promising to change your life. I’m not an evangelist for any single system; I’m just a cog in a same flawed machine we’re all part of, trying to get my sh*t done and staving off burnout. I’ve read every productivity book in existence... more information about the talk The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck About Getting Things Done
The Best (and Worst) Widgets, AI Tools and Browser Extensions for ADA Compliance
From commercial overlay widgets promising quick fixes for compliance to usability experts recommending the use of AI to generate custom user interfaces on the fly, the landscape of accessibility tech is growing more and more complex. With the updated Section 508 deadlines looming for state and local entities, what tools... more information about the talk The Best (and Worst) Widgets, AI Tools and Browser Extensions for ADA Compliance
Text Embeddings for Entity Resolution and Name Disambiguation in the Library Catalog
Library catalogs have long grappled with the challenges of entity resolution, hindered by legacy string-based workflows for authority control. Standards that were suitable for printed card catalogs have become a significant source of technical debt in the digital era. For instance, current systems for automated authority control fail to disambiguate... more information about the talk Text Embeddings for Entity Resolution and Name Disambiguation in the Library Catalog
Publishing and Archiving Large Datasets in Data Repositories
Researchers collect and analyze large datasets in a majority of academic areas. At Purdue we receive a lot of requests from researchers who desire to publish and share the large datasets in the university’s data repository, which is the platform for researchers to share and publish datasets and meet federal... more information about the talk Publishing and Archiving Large Datasets in Data Repositories
Preserving History Through Advanced 3D Scanning: A Case Study on Gaussian Splat Photogrammetry
In the realm of historical preservation, innovative technologies play a crucial role in capturing and safeguarding the essence of culturally significant objects and structures. This presentation highlights a cutting-edge 3D scanning project undertaken by our library team, wherein we took over 3,600 photos of multiple rooms of a historically significant... more information about the talk Preserving History Through Advanced 3D Scanning: A Case Study on Gaussian Splat Photogrammetry
MARC record validation with Python and Pydantic
Pydantic is a widely used data validation library for Python favored for its speed and extensibility. With Pydantic users can define schema or models against which to validate data. Users receive detailed reports of any validation errors after passing data into or validating a data object against a model. In... more information about the talk MARC record validation with Python and Pydantic
Making the Development Process Inclusive of Disabilities
With accessibility, we often think about the finished technology. Disabled people, however, are not just users. Many developers, managers, testers, etc. have disabilities that our work practices may be problematic but addressable. This talk will highlight several common practices and tools used in development (e.g., Slack, agile) and how to... more information about the talk Making the Development Process Inclusive of Disabilities
LC Subject Heading Remapping: Making Good on Good Intentions
Library of Congress subject headings don’t always reflect the values of the institutions using them, and they change at the speed of Congress. Over the years there has been a desire for institutions to choose for themselves what words to use for LC terms, and there have been a variety... more information about the talk LC Subject Heading Remapping: Making Good on Good Intentions
Infosec for a world at war
What does it mean to host digitized library collections that state actors would like to destroy? Or to have custody of data and documents that are evidence in a political battle? What responsibilities do we have to Justice, when we might hold evidence relevant to land back lawsuits, which powerful... more information about the talk Infosec for a world at war
If You Give a Girl a Website (She'll ask for metadata searching)
When non-library platforms want to integrate online archival materials into their project, they often turn to pre-made web content management systems to lessen the need for advanced coding and metadata skills. This was the case for Windows to the World (W2W), a digital humanities curriculum platform that uses material from... more information about the talk If You Give a Girl a Website (She'll ask for metadata searching)
Getting Everyone on the Same Page: Building a Shared Governance Structure for Digital Projects
Coordinating the work of multiple people on projects can be a thorny problem. This can be especially difficult when folks work in different departments and on different levels of the org chart. The University of Rochester has been working on a governance structure to ensure that the handling of digital... more information about the talk Getting Everyone on the Same Page: Building a Shared Governance Structure for Digital Projects
Enhancing MARC Language Metadata with Ruby and Indigenous Tenacity
There are many Indigenous and minority languages that are grouped in broader MARC language codes, limiting the ability to find materials in a specific language. I was inspired by the University of Hawaii’s Indigenous Pacific Languages cataloging project, which highlighted the limitations of the MARC Language Codes. I undertook this... more information about the talk Enhancing MARC Language Metadata with Ruby and Indigenous Tenacity
Cataloging Video via Computer Vision
Imagine you are tasked with cataloging a large stack of books. Suppose each book has no cover, no table of contents, and no index. And suppose copy cataloging is not an option. Catalogers working on large collections of old, digitized videos face a similar challenge. A video series might have... more information about the talk Cataloging Video via Computer Vision