The 2020 awards winners represent a variety of institutions and projects. Archivists, digital scholarship, and open access champions at academic libraries and community archives from around Texas are among this year’s winners, showcasing the cross disciplinary and inter-institutional partnerships that libraries and archives leverage so well.
Texas Digital Library is proud to present this year’s TDL Award Winners, accompanied by their nominations.
Excellence Award | Trailblazer Award | Outreach Award | Student Excellence Award | Scholarly Communication Award | Individual Impact Award | TDL Service Award | Stay Engaged
Excellence Award | LGBTQ Archive at UNT
The TDL Excellence Award honors a specific project that demonstrates overall excellence in one or more areas of digital library practice.
The winner of this year’s Excellence Award is the University of North Texas LGBTQ Archive.
Project Team Members:
- Morgan Gieringer, Head of Special Collections, UNT Libraries
- Jaimi Parker, Exhibits Coordinator, UNT Libraries
By Robert Emery, Community Advocate for The Dallas Way, and 2019 Outreach Award winner
Jaimi Parker and Morgan Gieringer co-authored an article that was recently published in the Journal of Archival Organization, titled “Collection and Digitization of Artifacts in the University of 4.” It proves their excellence in digitization.
Their LGBTQ Archive is one of the most requested resources in Special Collections, and has been used by students, scholars, filmmakers, and journalists across the country. Unlike many of UNT’s collections, the LGBTQ Archive also contains a large number of artifacts. As part of a community-built archive, artifacts within LGBTQ collections have a particularly personal significance. Artifacts also have potent emotional significance as symbols of activism and public displays of identity.
The need to create digital representations of these unique and important materials cannot be overlooked. New workflows for the capture and description of this digital content have been created. The archive contains some collections made up entirely of t-shirts or buttons, while most collections contain a mix of wearable or displayable artifacts mixed in with more typical archival documents and photographs. These two women share “best practices” with their readers, in regard to creating digital surrogates, proving their excellence in this emerging area of historical archiving. Since artifacts play such an essential role in archives, it is important to develop standards for their digital representation and digital preservation.
As Morgan and Jaimi have ventured into this new area with relatively few standards in place across the profession. They have made clear that standards need to be set to ensure process continuity and that all important information about the artifacts is captured both in the digital surrogates and in the associated metadata.
Trailblazer Award | San Antonio African American Community Archive and Museum
The Trailblazer Award honors the work of an individual or group within a Texas academic library who has used limited resources in innovative ways to create, maintain or support digital collections.
This year’s winner of the Trailblazer Award is the San Antonio African American Community Archive and Museum (SAAACAM).
By Chaitra Powell, African American Collections and Outreach Archivist, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
I encountered the loose assortment of artists, librarians, historians, and community members that would become SAAACAM for the first time at the AT&T Arena in October of 2016. The Kronkosky Foundation along with the Spurs organization hosted us as cultural heritage practitioners in a day long conversation about the need for African American community-based archives in the city of San Antonio. I will never forget the audacity of that group, situated in a city full of world class museums and universities, deciding that they could protect and tell their story better than anyone else and they would become a destination for anyone wanting to understand the story of African Americans in San Antonio.
In the four years that I have been associated with SAAACAM, I can see them making successful moves in so many different directions. They are engaging San Antonio’s African American community through a series of oral history collecting and community scan (history harvest) events. They are building their own workforce as they train volunteers to conduct these events and draw on the unique strengths of community members through a broad slate of committees (finance, research, programming, etc.) managed by the SAAACAM board of directors. They are engaging general audiences with their participation in citywide events like Dia de Los Muertos, Fiesta, and Juneteenth programs and membership with San Antonio’s tourism bureau — including revisions to the script of the wildly popular Go Rio river tours in downtown San Antonio .
They are engaging the next generation of K-12 students and college level scholars. Their work on K-12 African American Studies curriculum development is slated to be approved in April 2020 and implemented throughout the state of Texas in the Fall semester. They’ve partnered with faculty and students at Texas A&M at San Antonio to produce original research and digital projects on Black placemaking, the legacy of the Sutton Family, and the Black ranching families that made contributions to the city’s economy and culture. They’ve made inroads with historic preservation groups in San Antonio with their research and advocacy around historically African American burial sites and the Woolworth’s Building in the Alamo Plaza.
SAAACAM’s strategic partnerships, fundraising, and allocation of resources has reached a new milestone as they’ve secured enough funds to hire a museum director, program manager, and accountant! SAAACAM is doing this high impact work with in community with a vision for a 21st century, mostly born digital, museum and archive at its center. Organizations like SAAACAM are vital to field of librarianship. They are not just talking about it, they are actually showing us how to be an archive that values racial, class, and socioeconomic diversity, encourages a plurality of voices from history, and being responsive to the needs of its community. Their collaborations with UNC-Chapel Hill and Texas A&M at San Antonio are groundbreaking in the amount of curiosity and deference they have for the role of an institutional repository and at the same time the autonomy and control over their collections that their enterprise requires. They are learning about the value of curation, description, preservation and making decisions that will ensure the long time use and viability of their materials.
The SAAACAM organization is trailblazing because they are successfully pulling together the threads of San Antonio’s African American community to imagine a new future. They are standing in the face of gentrification and erasure and using the voices of their ancestors to present an alternative. They are a model for community archives and it has been our honor to collaborate with them on our Community Driven Archives program.
Outreach Award | Texas Film Round-Up
The Outreach Award honors an individual or team that demonstrates a creative and successful approach to reaching new users and building awareness of an organization’s digital library.
The winner of this year’s Outreach Award is the Texas Film Round-Up at the Texas Archive of the Moving Image.
By Elizabeth Hansen, interim Director, Texas Archive of the Moving Image
The Texas Film Round-Up is a ground-breaking public service initiative to discover, preserve, digitize and disseminate moving images of Texas. It is a collaboration between the Texas Archive of the Moving Image (TAMI) and the Office of the Governor’s Texas Film Commission (TFC). The program has four components – the free digitization of Texas-related film and video, the growth of a streaming video library, a film “round-up” tour raising public awareness across the state, and an educational curriculum for use in K-12 classrooms. The program started in September of 2008. The program was awarded the American Association for State and Local History’s highest honor, the Wow Award, in 2010.
The cornerstone of the Film Round-Up program is the free digitization of any Texas-related film or video whose owners are willing and able to contribute a digital copy of the material to the TAMI online library. Although this can include feature films, the main focus of the program is “orphan” film materials like home movies, newsreels, educational films, training videos, locally-produced film and television, advertisements and other. Originals are returned to the owners along with information on how to best store the materials as well as digital files. The program is open to both institutions and individuals. As of February 2020, the organization has digitized more than 38,000 films and videos.
In order to promote the free digitization service, TAMI organizes events in several cities throughout the state called the Texas Film Round-Up. At these programs, people can drop off films for the digitization program and view archival moving images from the TAMI collection. The Round-Up has traveled to more than 40 Texas cities to collect materials for the program representing the diversity of the state.
After digitization, a selection of films from the Round-Up are researched and cataloged, and become a part of the TAMI video library. The online library is accessible to the public and easy to browse. It is used by multiple constituents — everyone from Texas students to people around the world interested in the State’s history. More than 3,600 films from the Round-Up are now available through the website: texasarchive.org. The organization encourages viewing and use of the materials through curated exhibits and an active social media presence.
To encourage the educational use of these films, TAMI launched a Teacher Resource section of its website in August of 2009 including lesson plans, activities, directed searches, and tips on use archival footage in the classroom. Lesson plans use the TAMI collection to teach relevant Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) for social studies and media literacy in grades K through 12.
Student Excellence Award | ATX Barrio Archive
The Student Excellence Award honors an individual undergraduate or graduate student that demonstrates overall excellence and contributions to digital library practice.
This year’s Student Excellence Award winner is Alan Garcia, creator of the ATX Barrio Archive.
By Alexandria Suarez, Texas Digital Library
I strongly believe that the ATX Barrio Archive is an exemplary digital archive that focuses on community outreach. This project is led by Alan Garcia, my former classmate and fellow student at UT Austin’s School of Information, who researches and digitizes these stories and who also interviews community members to share their stories.
In a city like Austin, that is constantly trying to erase and gentrify people of color and their communities, archives are critical to keeping stories alive.
The barrio archive digitizes images from local archives and libraries, community members, businesses, and families and brings them all together on Instagram. With over 500 posts, and over 5,500 followers, the archive reaches those who are not only in the Latinx/African American community, but perhaps more importantly, those who are outside of it.
It is the mission of the archive to demonstrate to the marginalized communities in Austin that their voice not only exists, but deserves to be heard. The archive also demonstrates how important it so for policy makers and those unfamiliar with the rich history of these communities to see the value in recognizing the people and places that have made Austin the city it is today.
Watch this interview with Alan about the archive.
Scholarly Communications Award | Dr. Deidre Rios
The Scholarly Communications Award honors the work of an individual or group of academics, including faculty and librarians, who have made significant advances in our understanding of the issues surrounding scholarly communications.
This year’s recipient of the Scholarly Communications Award is Dr. Deidre (Dede) Rios, Director of Optometric & Clinical Library Services at the University of Incarnate Word.
By Tracey Mendoza, Dean of Libraries, University of the Incarnate Word
The Optometric Clinical Practice (ISSN 2575-7717) is a new, open access, peer-reviewed journal devoted to optometric clinical practice that was launched to serve the needs of clinicians and to fill a gap in optometric literature that serves a community of practitioners, researchers, students, an in turn, their patients. The intent was to establish this publication as an open access journal that in the words of UIW Provost, Dr. Barbara Aranda-Naranjo, “allows an instantaneous international readership and furthers the field with evidence-based science”. Dr. Timothy Wingert, Dean of the UIW Rosenberg School of Optometry, supported the creation of this open access publication as it was derived from RSO’s clinical program mission of providing exemplary vision care locally and globally.
I nominate Dr. Rios for this award because this journal would have had difficulty getting off the ground without the hard work and consistent pressure applied by Dr. Rios as the associate editor of the publication. From the outset, Dr. Rios researched the possibilities and merits of an open access, peer-reviewed publication with the Deans of the Rosenberg School of Optometry and UIW Libraries beginning in early 2017. She demonstrated the benefits not only to the UIW community but to a global audience interested in literature of this discipline. In total, Dr. Rios estimates that she has spent 200 hours getting the journal to its publication in October 2019. Not bad for the timeframe and for a day job that isn’t associate editor.
As part of her work, Dr. Rios serves as the liaison between the UIW Libraries Athenaeum and the Rosenberg School of Optometry. To get the journal on its feet, Dr. Rios filed for the ISSN, formatted and submitted the application for the journal, updated the website, set-up training for editors and reviewers, helped to determine if manuscripts need revisions, created the masthead, designed the promotional materials, worked with SPARC and other Library Publishing Forum members to improve online journal publications, and she continues to review and format each article as well as track readership. Because Optometric Clinical Practice is a new, open access journal, Dr. Rios informs other vision science faculty and librarians about the publication. She will continue to serve as an associate editor and is working to make it easier for interested contributors by creating a template for the author’s agreement. She is now working with CrossRef to have DOI’s assigned to each article as well as assigning and uploading metadata and she will pursue getting the journal included and indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals and given time, PubMed.
Because Dr. Rios is a strong advocate for open access, this important journal is available to fill a scholarly niche that was vacant. Dr. Rios has set an excellent example for the UIW community in how such works are possible to support and still meet a standard of excellence. I see her continuing on a path of supporting scholarly dissemination of information that is equitable and diverse as she pursues professional development opportunities in this area.
This publication is part of the BePress Health and Physical Education Commons, Optometry Commons, Other Education Commons, Other Medicine and Health Sciences Commons, and the Other Public Health Commons.
Individual Impact Award | Anne Washington
The Individual Impact Award honors an individual who has made significant contributions and improvements related to the field of digital curation and digital scholarship. Nominees demonstrated their impact by fostering the development of students and early career professionals, facilitating communities, building infrastructure, and/or contributing to scholarship.
This year’s Individual Impact winner is Anne Washington, Coordinator of Metadata Services at the University of Houston Libraries.
By Annie Wu, Head of Metadata and Digitization Services, University of Houston
It is my great pleasure to nominate Anne Washington, Metadata Services Coordinator at the University of Houston (UH) Libraries, for the 2020 TDL Individual Impact Award. Anne has made significant contributions in digital and metadata field and has displayed high impact by facilitating communities, building infrastructure and contributing to scholarship and profession.
Anne has demonstrated outstanding leadership via active services in library organizations at the national and regional levels. She has served as the co-chair for the ALCTS/LITA Linked Library Data Interest Group, Vice-chair/Chair-elect of the ALCTS Metadata Interest Group, Programming co-chair for the ALCTS Metadata Interest Group, committee member and organizer of Linked Open Data in Libraries Archives and Museums (LODLAM) Summit and DLF Forum Program Committee member. Anne also served in TDL DPLA Metadata working Group and National Information Standards Organization (NISO) working group.
Anne’s leadership in facilitating community has been demonstrated in her service and activities in the South Central States Fedora Users Group (SCSFUG). As past-chair and co-chair of the group, Anne has collaborated with TDL colleagues and regional institutions in organizing, planning, setting the programming agenda and logistics for the group. The SCSFUG meetings have provided much needed opportunity for discussion, collaboration, and networking around relatively new technology in use of Fedora, Samvera and Islandora and other related digital systems/tools. Her contributions has made it possible for a community of practice around Fedora to emerge in the TDL space, making all of us better practitioners and improving our competencies in these emerging areas of repository development and management.
Anne has made significant contributions to innovative projects of national level impact. She is a key member of the Bridge2Hyku project team, which was awarded a $250,000 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to develop a migration toolkit to assist institutions in adopting the open-source Hyku digital repository. She has led the collaborative effort to assess and analyze the project partners’ digital collections data. She has also developed and documented guidelines and strategies for digital collections migration, which is critically important for institutions to successfully migrate their content.
At UH Libraries, Anne has made vital contributions to the Bayou City DAMS (BCDAMS) implementation project, helping the team to establish the libraries next generation digital system’s infrastructure. She has shown courage and capability to assume the leadership of the project, coordinating activities in development of the MVP of our next generation DAMS, facilitating the work of the BCDAMS Data Migration Working Group, standardizing legacy metadata, populating UH Libraries’ Cedar linked data vocabularies and designing metadata application profile. Anne’s significant contributions has helped to advance the strategic goals and mission of UH Libraries.
Anne has shown great enthusiasm in conducting research and has made outstanding contributions to scholarship in digital, metadata and linked data initiatives. Anne has actively presented her research and best practices in high profile venues such as the ALA Annual conference, the Digital Library Federation Forum, the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative annual meeting and Digital Initiative Symposium. Over the last four years, Anne has offered over twenty presentations, workshops, and webinars at national and international level conferences and meetings. Additionally, Anne continues to grow her record of scholarly work, authoring and contributing to numerous peer reviewed articles published in journals such as ALCTS Library Resources & Technical Services, Journal of Library Metadata, Code4Lib. Her co-authored monograph, “Linked Data for the Perplexed Librarian,” is was published in March, 2020.
Anne Washington has shown excellence in promoting common and best practices across the profession, advancing community open source initiatives and fostering research in digital and metadata field. Her significant effort and contributions in digital and metadata field make her well-qualified candidate for the TDL Individual Impact Award.
TDL 2020 Service Award | Christopher Starcher
The TDL Service Award is given at the discretion of the Texas Digital Library to an individual or group at a member institution who do exceptional work in the service of the Texas Digital Library consortium.
This year we are pleased to recognize Chris Starcher from Texas Tech University.
By Courtney Mumma, Deputy Director of Texas Digital Library
For the past few years, I’ve had the privilege to work alongside Chris in the Vireo Open Source Community as a contributing developer and active member of the Vireo User Group’s Steering Committee. Chris, TDL recognizes you with this award for your significant contributions over several years to the Vireo Steering Committee and open source community at large.
TDL and the Vireo community have benefitted so much from not only your code contributions and participation in development, but also your calm, steady, and consistent leadership on the VUG Steering Committee. You are a wonderful colleague, and you always act with the community in mind. Your recent enlistment of a colleague to get involved in Vireo 4 bug-fixing is further evidence of that, and we know you’ll serve as product owner, a role you recently stepped into on behalf of the Steering committee, with gusto. We really could not have reached a Vireo 4 release without you, and we are enriched as a consortium by your enthusiasm for collective progress and open source infrastructure.
Congratulations, Chris, for your service to TDL!
Stay Engaged
Inspired by these award-winning projects? Nominate yourself, your colleagues, or an organization for a TDL Award. Nominations for 2020 will open in Fall 2019.
Meanwhile, stay engaged with this year’s award-winning organizations and partners on social media.
| Texas Digital Library | |||
| Twitter @TXDigLibrary Facebook @texasdigitallibrary | |||
| 2020 Excellence Award Winner | |||
| LGBTQ Archive University of North Texas Libraries Twitter @UNT_Libraries Instagram @unt_libraries | |||
| 2020 Trailblazer Award Winner | |||
| San Antonio African American Community Archive and Museum Facebook @SAAACAM Twitter @archivemuseum | |||
| 2020 Outreach Award Winner | |||
| Texas Film Round-Up Texas Archive of the Moving Image Facebook @texasarchive Twitter @texasarchive Instagram @texasarchive | |||
| 2020 Student Excellence Award Winner | |||
| Alan Garcia ATX Barrio Archive | |||
| 2020 Individual Impact Award Winner | |||
| Anne Washington University of Houston Libraries Facebook @uhlibraries Twitter @UHoustonLib | |||
| 2020 Scholarly Communications Award Winner | |||
| Dr. Deidre (DeDe) Rios University of the Incarnate Word Facebook @UIWLibrary Twitter @UIWLibrary Instagram @uiwlibrary | |||
| 2020 TDL Service Award Winner | |||
| Christopher Starcher Texas Tech University Facebook @TexasTechLib Twitter @TexasTechLib Instagram @texastechlib |
Learn more about the TDL Awards and read about past years’ winners.