2022 DLG PARTNER EVENT

Thursday, April 14

1-2:30 Welcome and Keynote

 “Engaging Users with Digital Collections,” Franky Abbott, Chief Content Strategist, Levine Museum of the New South

Which ideas and strategies can help us connect our digital collections with specific audiences? In this talk, Franky Abbott will share possible approaches to planning, designing, promoting, and measuring the success of initiatives that maximize the impact of collections by sharing them creatively with new users. Along the way, she will also share examples from exemplary projects as well as her own successes and failures with digital projects.

Franky Abbott is the Chief Content Strategist at the Levine Museum of the New South in Charlotte, North Carolina where she leads a team creating public programs, school programs, exhibits and digital experiences, and community engagement. She has consulted on curation and education projects for a variety of libraries, archives, and museums and previously worked as Curation and Education Strategist at Digital Public Library of America. Franky has a PhD in American Studies from Emory University.

2:45-3:45 Lightning talks

1. 1. “Warning! Potentially Harmful Content Ahead,” Allison Galloup, University of North Georgia

In 2019 a Virginia university’s institutional repository manager was faced with a tough situation: the president of the university asked them to remove digital copies of all of the school’s yearbooks that contain racist imagery. Watching the IR manager’s struggle on Twitter and seeing the response from the wider community, UNG Special Collections & Archives faculty recognized that similar items could be found in their yearbooks and wanted to get ahead of any potential issues. The result is a potentially harmful content statement that is displayed on most pages in the digital collections. This session will cover drafting the harmful content statement as well as collaboration with other departments within the university for support.

1. 2. “The Benefits and Reuse of Digitized Materials for Researchers and Public Historians,” Kailey J. McAlpin, PhD candidate, Georgia State University

McAlpin will discuss her experience working with digitized cultural and historical materials from the Digital Library of Georgia database in the process of curating an online exhibit. She will also talk about the way that DLG's digitized collections has facilitated my own work as a doctoral candidate at Georgia State University conducting dissertation research and how it is beneficial to public historians working in institutions of cultural heritage. 

1. 3. “On These Grounds Project,” Sierra Beighey, HSUGA Data Specialist & Graduate Student at the University of Georgia

Beighey will discuss her role testing the On These Grounds Linked Open Data ontology. The ontology is focused on adequately describing the lived experiences of those enslaved individuals who labored in bondage at higher education institutions that are represented in those institutions' archival holdings.

1. 4. “Living Archives: Working with the Digital Library of Georgia's Primary Sources,” Toni Johnson, PhD candidate, Atlanta University

Using my experience as an intern with the New Georgia Encyclopedia and the Digital Library of Georgia, I put together a digital humanities project proposal for my Digital Humanities course that would prepare me to submit such work for grants or other projects. My experience with the primary sources was enlightening and helpful. My project centered around African-American land ownership and agriculture in Georgia, and the DLG offered plenty of sources to convey a story. As a humanities Ph.D. student that focuses on English, storytelling is an integral part of my everyday work. The use of archival newspapers, photographs, and even recordings was exciting to work with, as they allowed me as a researcher the opportunity to focus on a topic, but discover how these archives or history have led to the way our world is shaped today. 

1. 5. “Increasing Visibility of Content with IIIF & Access Controls,” Emily Porter, Emory University Libraries 

The Emory Libraries launched a centralized digital repository in 2020, which includes tiered access controls implemented in IIIF and the Universal Viewer. In this talk we will describe our design process and show examples of implemented controls.

1. 6. “Repurpose, Reuse, Recycle: Maximizing Efficiency and Outreach,” Kelly Zacovic, Archivist, City of Savannah Archives

The City of Savannah Municipal Archives strives to maximize the reach of our public programming through digital repurposing and reuse. When our small staff with limited time and resources was tasked with “doing it all,” we asked ourselves – Why reinvent the wheel? Now, social media posts live on in online exhibits, in-person educational programming pivots to online self-guided lesson plans, and summer camp activities are published to be enjoyed all year long!  This lightning talk will highlight the planning process and a few examples of digital resource reuse the Municipal Archives has undertaken in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

1. 7. “The Rylander Theater and the DLG Subgranting Program,” Evangeline Athanasiou, Ph.D. Student in Musicology, CUNY Graduate Center

Athanasiou discusses why the Rylander Theater in Americus, GA applied for a DLG subgrant and their experience participating in the program.

1. 8. "Applications of Georgia's Digital Library in the Cultural Resource Management Field," Pam Enlow Devore, Historian, New South Associates, Inc.

A discussion of how DLG resources are employed by historians and archaeologists beyond academia in the cultural resources management sector, with emphasis on how the COVID-19 pandemic changed the way research is conducted within the private sector when deadlines loom and clients can't wait.

4-5 Rights presentations

• “3...2...1 and Action! Investigating Copyright and Implementing Access Within the Southern Labor Archives Film Collection,” Lisa Vallen, Rachel Senese, Georgia State University

This session will provide an overview of the work that goes into an AV digitization project from the digitization itself, to quality control and copyright clearance. We will dive into how we conducted and applied our copyright clearance as well as some tips and tricks we learned along the way.

• “Rightsstatments.org: An Update,” Emily Gore, Assistant Dean of Libraries, University of Tennessee, Knoxville

RightsStatements.org provides standardized, actionable rights statements for digital cultural heritage.  Originally released for use in 2016, the suite of 12 statements, crafted by DPLA and Europeana leaders and partners, have remained largely static.  In early 2020, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, a review of the current statements with an eye towards version 2.0 began, but work was largely halted as a result of the pandemic.  Recent efforts have begun to restart this work, and Emily Gore, chair of the RightsStatements.org implementation working group and member of the statements working group, will share a preview of this potential update, discuss why it is needed and take feedback from DLG partners about the potential update.

Friday, April 15

1-2 Educational outreach

• “Education Outreach with GHS: Local, State, and National Partnerships,” Lisa Landers, Georgia Historical Society

In this session, learn how the Georgia Historical Society (GHS) engages in educational outreach to create and present engaging activities and programs for K-12 classrooms across Georgia. Lisa Landers, the GHS Education Manager, will discuss how GHS taps into a wide range of resources through fostering partnerships with local, state, and national organizations to better support Georgia’s teachers and students. 

• Rachel Duke, Florida State University

2:15-3:15 Partner showcase

1. “A Landscape of the Illicit: Mapping Sex Work in Natchez, Mississippi”, Sarah I. Rodriguez, M.A. in History student, University of West Georgia,

Boats, brothels, booze; Natchez has it all. Natchez, Mississippi is a small town on the Mississippi River that has a long history of a vice economy. That economy remained bustling into the twentieth century, meaning that brothels functioned at the same time that the Civil Rights Movement came to Natchez, the Kinsey Report was released, and desegregation slowly pushed Jim Crow policies back. How did these phenomena exist within the same small community? Sarah I. Rodriguez discusses how to create a historical geodatabase reflecting the history of the sex work industry in Natchez industry during the mid-1900s and how mapping this history provides an illustrative picture of how interconnected sex work was with the racial, sexual, political, and economic infrastructure of this small Southern town.

2. “UGA Law Library Leverages DCX: A Tour of Our New Digital Exhibits Site,” Rachel Evans, UGA Law Library

In the fall of 2021 UGA Law Library's institutional repository site Digital Commons launched DCX, a new digital exhibits platform. Invited as beta testers for summer 2021, the law library has been transitioning previous methods of delivering digital exhibits to the new interface. In this short tour, we'll share a few exhibit examples, including a before and after from the user's perspective, as well as a quick behind-the-scenes at why we love the new platform.

3. “Converting Literary Journals into the Open Journal Systems Platform,” Vanesa Evers, Woodruff Library Atlanta University Center

Open Journal Systems (OJS) is a widely used, open source software application for managing and publishing scholarly journals. OJS was developed to manage the submission, peer review workflow and publishing of scholarly journals. In this Partner Spotlight presentation, attendees will learn how the AUC Woodruff Library adapted the OJS platform to meet the specific needs for archiving Aunt Chole, a literary journal published by Spelman College. Aunt Chloe: A journal of Artful Candor, published in print since the 1980s, went fully online in 2019 and features multi-media content such as art, poetry, photography and music. Come learn more about this exciting process!

4. “A New Kind of Family Day,” Jan Hebbard, Exhibition coordinator for the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library

In this presentation, Jan Hebbard will describe how she and her colleagues were able to pivot from in-person to virtual family days after the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. She will also touch on their use of Omeka, an opensource software, to increase overall accessibility to their exhibits program. 

3:30-4:30 Virtual exhibits and online education

• “Knowledge Sharing About Digital Exhibits with DLF’s Working Groups,” Gayle Schechter, Council on Library and Information Resources

The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) is an independent, nonprofit organization that forges strategies to enhance research, teaching, and learning environments in collaboration with libraries, cultural institutions, and communities of higher learning. This session will provide a brief overview of CLIR programs of significance to practitioners who engage with digital exhibits with a special focus on resources and upcoming events from CLIR’s Digital Library Federation (DLF) working groups.

• Kimberly Stokes, GPB Education