The 2012 Texas Conference on Digital Libraries brought together nearly 150 librarians, software developers, faculty researchers, and others interested in the future of libraries and scholarly communication for two days of presentations, posters, workshops, and informal networking opportunities. The conference was held May 24-25 at the AT&T Executive Education and Conference Center in Austin.
The theme for the 2012 conference was “Connections: Connecting with Our Users through Digital Services.” Many presentations and workshops covered topics related to this theme, including relationship-building with faculty researchers through digital library services, ideas for promoting digital collections to the academic community, and increasing access to “hidden” materials through digital collections. There were also panels on “big data” and collaborative collection-building.
Keynote Speakers
James Hilton, University of Virginia, gives the opening keynote address on efforts to build a "Digital Preservation Network."
Keynote speakers for the event were James Hilton, CIO of the University of Virginia, and John Price Wilkin, Executive Director of HathiTrust and Associate University Librarian for Library Information Technology at the University of Michigan. Both men spoke about large-scale, collective efforts to provide access to and safeguard the scholarly record.
Hilton, in his address, spoke on the effort to create a national, federated preservation infrastructure through the Digital Preservation Network project, which he is leading. TDL has signed on to support the development of this infrastructure. Wilkin closed the conference with a discussion on the successes of HathiTrust in facilitating large-scale digitization and access to millions of documents through its digital repository.
Poster Session and Minute Madness
Wendy Martin (left) and Anna Lamphear of UT Libraries presented one of twenty posters at the TCDL 2012 poster session.
On the evening of May 24, the conference held a poster session and reception featuring 20 posters on a variety of topics and projects. Preceding the reception, poster presenters enticed attendees to come see their posters through a “Minute Madness” session, during which each presenter gave a rapid-fire, one-minute summary of his/her poster’s main ideas.
More than two dozen institutions were represented among the attendees, including academic, public, and corporate libraries.
The conference was sponsored and hosted by the Texas Digital Library.
For more about TCDL 2012, visit the conference website. There, you will find access to: