VRA Conference Minneapolis 2024

What does a library or archive do when over 250 disaffiliating United Methodist Church (UMC) representatives arrive at the door with all their records? When faced with this question in 2023, Pitts Theology Library staff acted swiftly and decisively to ensure that these records would represent more than a difficult moment in the UMC tradition by contributing to a project much larger in scope and scale that will benefit people across the state. Fortuitously, the influx of records from former UMC churches coincided with a digital humanities project led by Pitts, the Historic Rural Church Archive. The goal of the project is to support researchers, genealogists, and churchgoers exploring the histories of rural communities through the focal point of local churches across Georgia. Our panel will discuss the workflows involved in managing an unexpected and rapid accession of church collections, including accessioning, processing, and description. We will also discuss the new procedures we developed to expand engagement with the materials through the HRC Archive, including plans for community contributions, outreach activities, scanning days at local libraries, and more.

This panel is a case study on collaborative archiving and digital humanities practices with lessons learned about managing expectations, community-submitted records, holistic workflows, and external partnerships. Attendees can expect to learn just how messy an unexpected, large-scale acquisition can be but also see the potential of digital projects for making the best of archival materials for a wide audience.

Spiraling costs, limited time, complicated migrations, and user needs have led many institutions to find ways to connect disparate data repositories together for discovery, preservation, and more. Whether breaking out of multiple digital systems siloed at one institution or bringing together multiple institutions into a shared system, harnessing data from a variety of repositories requires a lot of decision-making. What are the common metadata fields and which are most important to users? What data types are available and which are most easily ingested for a common system? Are there tasks repositories share or are their multiple tasks, each important to a different constituency? With multiple players, the decision making must be collective and the maintenance will be ongoing. Our presenters will talk about these challenges and the need for high-level governance to start multi-stakeholder collaborative projects and keep them going.

Visual Resources in the era of Virtual Reality: a Framework for Digital Primary Source Literacy
Colleen Hoelscher

Museums, libraries, and archives are ever-increasingly creating digitized versions of primary source documents from their holdings, making visual resources findable and usable by researchers around the world. These resources are a boon for those teaching in the humanities as they allow students to conduct primary source research beyond the confines of their university library and highly curated published primary source collections. In addition, the shift to online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic has led to increased use of and comfort with digital archival sources, including visual resources. Even as digital primary sources become more available, the process of critically evaluating them has become more daunting: “deep fakes,” deceptive editing via Photoshop or other means, AI creations, filters, misleading metadata, and curatorial bias can all deceive students. This paper will provide guidance to librarians, educators, and other cultural heritage professionals who engage in teaching digital primary source literacy. Drawing on the SAA/ACRL Guidelines for Primary Source Literacy, it proposes a framework of key competencies displayed by the digital literate working with online archival sources: the ability to locate and access digital primary sources, critically evaluate digital sources for authenticity and bias, and correctly cite digital primary sources.

The Human Touch: Copyright Protections for Works Created by Deities, Creatures, and Machines
Kiowa Hammons

The 2014 Compendium of U.S. Copyright Office Practices: "only works created by a human can be copyrighted under United States law, which excludes photographs and artwork created by animals or by machines without human intervention" [1]. But can copyright law so easily discount creative content such as Monkey selfies, elephant oil paintings, songs written by religious deities, or pastoral landscape paintings by artificial intelligence? Particularly with the recent abundance of infringement cases regarding AI generated materials, how are the courts and we as users of AI systems (and owners of pets) come to terms with the value of non-human intellectual property?

Evaluating Digital Collections for Accessibility
Nora Davies

A presentation discussing methods for evaluating digital collections for accessibility. Begins with a breakdown of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and Universal design and ends with tips for evaluating digital collections and some examples of accessible collections. Attendees will learn the current standards for web accessibility and how to apply that to their own institutional collections or evaluate existing collections. This is especially relevant to attendees working with visual resources online who are interested in broadening the access of their collections.

In this session representatives from Minnesota-based visual collections will provide an overview of the collections they work with that are unique to the area and give attendees a window into the projects they are undertaking to make these local collections accessible to their community and beyond.

Heather Shirey, Professor of Art History at the University of St. Thomas and Co-Director of Urban Art Mapping, and Rita Morgan, MA student in Art History and Museum Studies at the University of St. Thomas and Research Assistant for Urban Art Mapping, will share how their interdisciplinary research team documents and analyzes street art that is often ephemeral and fleeting. Their George Floyd and Anti-Racist Street Art archive seeks to document street art from around the world created in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd and as part of an ongoing movement demanding social justice and equality.

Rita Walaszek Arndt, Program and Outreach Manager for Native American Initiatives at the Minnesota Historical Society (MNHS), will speak about her experience providing access to MNHS’s Native American collections and co-curating the current exhibits “Our Home: Native Minnesota” and “Reframing Our Stories.” The latter exhibit features archival photos of Native community members taken by Twin Cities photojournalists from the 1950s through the 1980s, now presented with context provided by community they depict.

Rebecca Gillette, Associate Director and Community Engagement Lead for Mapping Prejudice, will share how the Mapping Prejudice project works to identify and map racial covenants, clauses that were inserted into property deeds to keep people who were not White from buying or occupying homes. From their base in the University of Minnesota Libraries, their interdisciplinary team collaborates with community members to expose the history of structural racism and support the work of reparations.

Molly Huber, Outreach Coordinator for the Minnesota Digital Library (MDL), will talk about how MDL supports discovery and education through access to unique digital collections shared by cultural heritage organizations from across the state of Minnesota. MDL maintains a robust digital storytelling program, interpreting and packaging the materials in the aggregated collection through different lenses and formats to provide a multitude of entry points. MDL also expands access and digital capacity through the Scan for Keeps program, loaning digitization kits at no cost for community scanning events or internal archiving work.

The pastmapr Project - Spatial History Simplified
Andreas Knab and Kevin Borg

This paper is a presentation of the pastmapr project, an open-source tool for visualizing historic maps, images, and stories on the web. Originally developed in 2017 and updated and extended since then, pastmapr allows students to overlay scans of historic maps and plans onto modern street or satellite maps and mark points of interest with descriptive text and images. Users can then interactively explore the content by toggling map overlays, adjust overlay transparency, and filter markers. pastmapr is used in a teaching environment bringing together students from a variety of disciplines, including history and geography. All the underlying technologies used in the project are open source, and the default map layers included are the publicly available OpenStreetMaps and Esri satellite images. Examples are available online at https://pastmapr.lib.jmu.edu/

Effective Digital Storytelling: Tools, Techniques, and Best Practices
Otto Luna

This paper will present various free digital platforms designed for digital storytelling and sharing oral histories online. We’ll explore platforms like ArcGIS StoryMaps, Adobe Express’s webpage-building tool, and storytelling tools from the Knight Lab at Northwestern University (such as StorylineJS and TimelineJS). I’ll also discuss examples of how I’ve used some of these tools with undergraduate art history students. Additionally, we’ll cover best practices for effective digital storytelling, including selecting the right platform, crafting compelling narratives, thoughtfully incorporating sound, using high-quality visuals, adding interactive elements, and ensuring accessibility.

Measuring Impact for Sustainable Digital Projects
Dominique Luster, Binky Lush, Linda Ballinger

In 2023, the Judy Chicago Research Portal presented a case study in hosting and developing an online portal aggregating the archives of a contemporary feminist artist held in multiple institutions. The project represents a model for collaboration, iterative development, and improving access and discoverability for both feminist art archives and collections at smaller institutions.

This presentation builds on that case study by delving into the measurable impact of the use and impact strategy employed by the Judy Chicago Research Portal. The proposal seeks to offer attendees practical strategies on how their libraries and archives can increase awareness and engagement with users of their digital projects, using the Judy Chicago Research portal as a study.

Like other digital library projects, the team behind the Research Portal is committed to ensuring its sustainability and promoting it intentionally in the academic community. However, the team's unique approach has combined conference presentations and social media engagement to enhance research visibility and reach. We will share insights for the non-social media expert on how we analyze website visits, user downloads, and social media engagement. Additionally, we will discuss how to leverage usage data via Google Scholar and website analytics to further investigate a project's success.

In this presentation, we will share key findings and data on how this strategy has increased research impact, present case studies highlighting specific successes from our collaboration model, and engage in open discussion on how similar digital projects can design a results-driven impact strategy.

Decades of Digital Asset Mismanagement: The Good, the Bad, and the Depressing
Bonnie Rosenberg

The Art Institute of Chicago’s digital asset crisis began with the advent of digital photography. As dark rooms were converted to digital photography studios, files started to pile up. Images lived on servers, discs, hard drives, and bespoke—often broken—repositories. The migration effort born from this backlog is both a cautionary and laudatory tale. When given an expanse of time to right the wrongs of the past, we did so with skill. But what we really needed to fix this problem was a time machine.

Rethinking Access and Discovery for Large Digital Image Collections
Rachel Jaffe and Sue Chesley Perry

As we approach another digital asset management system (DAMS) migration, the UC Santa Cruz Library is taking a look at our past practices and strategies in order to find more sustainable methods to managing legacy content and providing access to our new digital image collections. In this session, we will explore alternative strategies for discovery and access to these collections, with a focus on sustainability, usability, and the needs of our users. We will discuss the pros, cons, and unintended consequences of the three different approaches to access and discovery we’ve employed over the years: Comprehensive and custom description Mass digitization with iterative description Hierarchical metadata with a highly structured model By shifting our view of migration as just another step in digital object life cycle, and rethinking our access strategy to be more proactive, questions of sustainability and value arise, including: How much of these collections get used? Who are they being used by and to what end? Are they serving the needs of our patrons? Is the descriptive metadata work sustainable? Who is going to do all this work? We will share the ways we’re now approaching discovery, such as employing user testing, designing metadata and files that meet user needs, and being more selective about what we make accessible.

Museums and Libraries: A Roadmap for Collaboration
Jill Kambs and Peter Gorman

The Chazen Museum of Art and the UW-Madison Libraries have collaborated to extend the Libraries' digital collections infrastructure to meet the discovery, digital management, and preservation needs of the museum. With a grant from the Mellon Foundation, we were able to incorporate new kinds of resources and workflows into our digital library platform, and implement the Libraries’ digital preservation service. Altogether, the resulting workflows and preservation service can now be offered to meet the needs of future external partners. The Libraries' existing architecture was key to the project’s success: a single digital ecosystem built from loosely-coupled components. We will demonstrate how this ecosystem ensures that 1) new features developed for this project automatically become available for future collaborations, 2) project partners can take advantage of selected components that best suit their needs, and 3) sustainability features of our core infrastructure are automatically applied to new partnerships. Standardized, flexible project management also contributed to successful collaboration. Using existing procedures for onboarding new project partners, focus groups to gather requirements, and an iterative, agile development process to show progress early and maintain momentum, we were able to quickly begin work and stay on track to meet grant milestones.

The Developing Leadership Abilities panel aims to both encourage involvement in VRA leadership positions and share stories and lessons from people in leadership roles. The session will also touch on challenges related to taking on such a responsibility and address ways to balance a leadership role with everyday work and life.

The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation has been digitizing a collection of more than 1,500 film negatives shot by Rauschenberg throughout the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. These images are critical to research for the artist’s forthcoming Catalogue Raisonné. Anne Boissonnault, Digital Asset Specialist, will discuss this year-and-a-half long project, and concurrent and related initiatives, from pilot selection, to copy stand photography, to cataloging and metadata cleanup.

The Center for Creative Photography has recently completed the digitization of Lola Alvarez Bravo’s collection of negatives. Numbering over 30,000 negatives in different formats, this project is the culmination of a five year digitization effort. In this session Miles Scott, Digital Archivist at CCP, will discuss the scope of the project from beginning to end. He will also discuss tracking progress, reusing metadata, storage and public access.

The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden digitized 312 artworks (2D and 3D) by Marcel Duchamp in preparation for a two-year exhibition showcasing all works from a single donor, including condition assessment, cataloging, photography, and exhibition photography of these works. Julia Murphy, Head of Documentation and Archives, will share the digitization process from private donor’s home to museum gallery installation. "

The Detroit Institute of Arts is the home of a monumental fresco cycle executed by Diego Rivera in 1932-1933. The process was documented by Ford Motor Company photographer W.J. Stettler, and the DIA Research Library & Archives preserves a set of approximately 378 prints. In addition, the archives has 44 of Stettler's negatives which are in various stages of degradation. Archivist James E. Hanks will discuss recent activities to preserve the primary sources as well consider the value of re-scanning materials, and how this project has enhanced outreach for the DIA Research Library & Archives. The DIA plans to include archival imagery in a future iteration of its digital asset management system, as well as expanding the use of linked data to provide access to collection items. As Diego Rivera's murals are some of the most popular works in the museum, the archives has an important role in art historical documentation.

Implementing Local Contexts in Rights Management to Ground Indigenous Data Sovereignty
Emma Carter

Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields has incorporated Local Contexts as part of its standard protocol for object research and collection care. Newfields is committed to being an ethical steward of its art collections and Local Contexts provides tools to better our standards of care and communication with Indigenous communities. I will explain how Local Contexts' Cultural Institutional Notices have been incorporated into our collection management system and describe our future plans for Labels and consultations with Indigenous communities. Newfields continues to work to be in compliance with NAGPRA regulations and to be a better partner to Indigenous communities, locally, nationally, and internationally.

Creating a Guide for the course "Decolonization, Activism, and Hope: Changing the Way We See Native America"
Colette Lunday Brautigam

This presentation will detail how a digital collections librarian collaborated with a professor for the course “Decolonization, Activism, and Hope: Changing the Way We See Native America.” The students had a term-long assignment that culminated in a poster session and they could only use Indigenous sources. The professor wanted a LibGuide to support the assignment and worked with the librarian to make it a great resource. The students needed to assess sources and also use many resources outside library and library databases. This required them to learn to use research skills and critical thinking skills on the open web. The resources involved were videos, podcasts, OA journals, websites, and some journals in JSTOR and the catalog.

Acquisitions of Films from the Global South
Iris Yellum

Streaming media continues to be an essential resource for faculty and students. Despite wider availability and awareness of streaming for university libraries, difficulties remain in acquiring both physical and streaming media. It can be particularly difficult to acquire films from the Global South. The increasingly consumerist approach in higher education can mean that our collections are simply not a representation of broader film production trends. Even contemporary films featured in prominent film festivals can be difficult to acquire, especially those in regional languages. As academic library vendors continue to acquire each other, this is a loss for university libraries seeking to build diverse collections and provide access for undergraduate courses and film scholars. While we must certainly make choices about what to curate, it is important to consider how the democratization of filmmaking should be reflected in collection development. Our film collections increasingly look similar to each other as we outsource some or all of our film acquisitions to media vendors. This paper will discuss the importance of building a diverse film collection and the obstacles to achieving that.

Presented by the Equitable Action Committee

Many states have passed legislation in the last few years that prevent funds being spent on DEI-focused work. Many GLAMR spaces receive public funding and, as such, are unable to move forward with work that is classified as falling under the DEI umbrella. This panel session seeks to explore the ways that DEI-focused work in GLAMR spaces has been impacted by such legislation. How do we move forward when DEI becomes a divisive term? How can we continue to support our VRA colleagues, as well as our patrons? What responsibility does VRA have to its members--how can we engage with these issues moving forward and codify DEI in our organization’s work?

This session will consider the current legal and technological landscape of fair use with images through the lens of the VRA Statement on the Fair Use of Images for Teaching, Research, and Study from 2013. What circumstances led to the Statement’s creation and use and how does it complement or diverge from other best practice documents? What gaps have developed in the last decade? Where does it meet or fail to meet practitioner and user needs? Presenters and attendees will be encouraged to discuss real-world scenarios they have encountered in their positions and how we might work together as a profession to navigate uncertain or unaddressed use cases. Is a revision worth the momentous effort? Can we envision other solutions?

Practicing digital preservation in a mindful way is critical for institutions to ensure that they are safeguarding their digital assets for future generations of researchers. Being “mindful” includes creating institutional policies around digital preservation that identify what should be preserved, why, and where. These policies should inform staff practices and workflows, including those concerning digitization and access. However, policies and practices can vary greatly across institutions due to differences in institutional priorities, resources such as staff availability and knowledge, and type of digital assets an institution holds.

Through a series of 7-minute lightning talks, session attendees will learn about different strategies that a variety of institutions have taken to advocate for, craft, and implement digital preservation policies and/or practices, and the successes and challenges of digital preservation endeavors. Talks featured in this session include both large and small institutions at various points in their digital preservation journey.

Summer Shetenhelm, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University
Kendall Aughenbaugh, Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens
Scott Kirycki, University of Notre Dame
Ellen LeClere, Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University
Grant Mandarino, Providence Archives

Since 2020, DPLA has worked with contributing partners to upload their open access digital content to Wikimedia Commons. Staff at Minitex and the Minnesota Digital Library were inspired by the success of the DPLA project and conceived of their own pilot to learn more about using the wiki-based, free-to-use media repository called Wikimedia Commons, along with its sister sites Wikidata and Wikipedia, to increase discoverability of content from digital collections. The outcomes from this successful pilot project included an expanded understanding of the Wikimedia platforms, increased discovery of digital content, and the recognized benefits of working together. Due to the enthusiastic success of the pilot project, we are continuing the project in 2024.

The presenters will discuss both the 2023 and 2024 Minitex Wikimedia projects, how we added archival images to Wikimedia Commons, WIkipedia, and added structured data (linked data) from Wikidata. Participants will learn about our goals, outcomes and impact on access and use, and some tips on how to get started with a Wikimedia project at your own organization.

Hands-On blended Pedagogies: Undergraduates, Special Collections, and Digital Collection building
Amanda Matava

The Digital Asset Management Department at Trinity College has partnered with a faculty member to pilot a course for undergraduates incorporating digital imaging, cataloging, and research in order to explore Trinity's new special collection of Thai buddhist amulets. Amanda Matava, Digital Archivist, will discuss the first two iterations of the class, lessons learned, and success stories with letting undergrads get hands-on with a copystand camera and cataloging platform.

Digitization: Practical Foundations for Digital Scholarship
Krystal Boehlert and Mark Buchholz

This paper will share how the UCR Library developed and implemented the 2023 Digital Scholarship Summer Certificate program for undergraduates. Our goals were that students would gain archival and digital research skills by engaging deeply with primary sources that highlight student activism and BIPOC student voices at UCR. The workshops roughly followed the digital project lifecycle by introducing archival research, imaging in the archives, metadata and data management, OCR, text analysis, and digital exhibits. In these workshops, we specifically highlighted digitization methods with low barriers to entry and accessible OCR tools. We also included mentions and demonstrations of higher-end imaging and processing tools such as digital copy stands, RAW processing workflows, and dedicated OCR applications such as Tesseract and ABBYY FineReader, in order to give students a roadmap for more advanced digital projects and their needs. Not only were we hoping to make the invisible labor visible, but we wanted students to understand the human decisions that go into creating research materials and how they as scholars make decisions about their research outputs.

Collaborative Stewardship: Revitalizing a Small Library Collection Through Faculty Student Partnerships
John Hosford

This presentation will showcase a successful collaboration between a librarian, an art historian, and students to research, preserve, and curate a digital and physical collection of 27 brass rubbings from 1967. I will discuss the process of bringing this collection to life, the steps taken to digitize and make the rubbings accessible, and the impact this project has had on my approach to librarian-faculty collaboration. I will also emphasize the potential for future collaborations between libraries, faculty, and students to create engaging educational experiences and meaningful digital collections. The value of partnerships that focus on preserving and showcasing library collections while enabling students to gain experience creating metadata in a collection management system is invaluable. This project has inspired future collaborative projects that combine library resources, faculty expertise, and student creativity.