The 2022 TDL 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. You can watch the 2022 Awards ceremony recording in the opening plenary session at the Texas Conference on Digital Libraries.
Excellence Award | William J. Hill Texas Artisans and Artist Archive
The TDL Excellence Award honors a specific project that demonstrates overall excellence in one or more areas of digital library practice.
The 2022 Excellence Award winner is the William J. Hill Texas Artisans and Artists Archive, at the Bayou Bend Collection and Gardens and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
Project Team Members:
- Margaret Culbertson, Project Director
- Michelle Johnson, Project Manager
The William J. Hill Texas Artisans and Artists Archive documents the lives, work, and products of Texas artisans and artists through 1900, with an emphasis on decorative arts, as well as painting, photography, and other media. The archive includes archival material, such as census records, city directory entries, and newspaper articles, and photographs of objects and artworks, from more than twenty partner institutions across the state, including archives, historic sites, museums, special collections libraries, universities, and private collections. Including these varied materials in one digital archive enables researchers to search and compare records and objects in innovative ways.
Working with their partner institutions, the Hill Archive team has devised ways to overcome metadata challenges presented by varying industry standards of description, documentation, and digitization. They have also developed workflows for metadata conversion to provide consistent, functional records, such as a process for uniformly applying both internally developed and industry-standard controlled vocabularies. Community outreach and engagement efforts have also been critical in the Hill Archive team’s work to develop a collaborative repository and strong partnerships.
Combining both object documentation and primary source research material in one platform opens up new research potential. Moreover, presenting historic records through the lens of artists and skilled craftspeople provides greater visibility of record collections unaffiliated with decorative arts and often overlooked by researchers. By partnering with a wide range of institutions and collections, including many that do not have digital repositories of their own, the Hill Archive makes valuable historical resources accessible to a wide audience.
Learn more about the William J. Hill Texas Artisans and Artists Archive.
Scholarly Communication Award | Texas A&M Libraries Scholarly Communications and Metadata Team
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 Scholarly Communications Award winners are the scholarly communications & metadata team at Texas A&M Libraries: D. J. Lee, Sarah Potvin, David Lowe, and Jeannette Ho.
This team pursued a strategy of enhancing the interoperability of A&M’s scholarly communication systems to make them more useful to researchers over the past three years. These systems can be used to publish a range of documents in the OAKTrust Digital Repository, represent the publications on faculty Scholars@TAMU profiles, and collect engagement metrics for the publications. The success of their project led to significantly increased faculty engagement, encouraging A&M’s faculty to curate many other documents in A&M’s repository.
See the amazing work done by the Scholars@TAMU team at Texas A&M Libraries.
Individual Impact Award | Michael Shensky
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 Michael Shensky, Head of Research Data Services at University of Texas at Austin.
Michael was nominated by members of TDL’s GIS Interest Group, for his work with building this group over the last two years. Building from a birds-of-a-feather session on geographic information systems (GIS) in 2020, Michael saw a need where a new community could grow. Gathering the many attendees from the GIS meeting, he organized a statewide Interest Group, building subcommittees and developing a sustainable structure for the group.
As the initial leader of the Interest Group, Michael was particularly thoughtful in creating a welcoming environment for everyone to feel like they had a place to be involved, regardless of expertise or affiliation. He created opportunities for anyone with the interest to get involved and contribute to the group’s work. His enthusiastic and inclusive leadership of the group has contributed to making the GIS Interest Group an active and engaged part of the TDL community.
Get involved with TDL’s GIS Interest Group and learn more about the collaboration Michael started.
Outreach Award | Stephen Sloan
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 collections.
The winner of the 2022 Outreach Award is Stephen Sloan, for his work on Waco History.
Dr. Stephen Sloan is the Director of the Institute for Oral History and Associate Professor of History at Baylor University. He founded and leads Waco History, a collaborative outreach project between the Institute for Oral History and The Texas Collection – both housed at Baylor. Using the over 6,000 oral history recordings from the Institute for Oral History and The Texas Collection’s wealth of historic images, the Waco History website and app makes the history of Waco come alive through digital collections and curated narratives that highlight the city’s history, heritage, and culture.
Stephen has led the Waco History team in developing 183 place-based stories, which incorporate historic images and oral history excerpts. He has presented about Waco history to a range of audiences and introduced the Waco History app community leaders, local groups, Baylor students, and K-12 educators. The Waco History project helps bring the collections of the Institute for Oral History and The Texas Collection to the community in an innovative and effective way that places new value on archival resources.
Explore Waco History through historic photos and oral histories of Waco’s citizens.
Trailblazer Award | Zhihong Xu
The Trailblazer Award honors the work of an individual or group who has used limited resources in innovative ways to create, maintain or support digital collections.
This year’s trailblazer is Zhihong Xu of Texas A&M Libraries.
Dr. Zhihong Xu is the Data Management Librarian at Texas A&M Libraries. Zhihong has been a strong supporter of the projects of the Texas Data Repository and the Texas Digital Library’s Carpentries pilot project. She served as a cohort train-the-trainer instructor of the Carpentries project and became certified as an instructor of The Carpentries R curriculum. When it came time to find an instructor for TDL’s first Carpentries workshop, Zhihong stepped up and became the first of TDL’s Carpentries cohort to serve as a workshop instructor, blazing the trail with her expertise, her willingness to lead, and her teamwork.
In addition to her work with the Carpentries, Zhihong also led a usability study for the Texas Data Repository that will help improve both the repository and the training for its users.
You can learn more about Dr. Xu on her profile at Scholars@TAMU.
Student Excellence Award | Misha Coleman, Ali Gunnells, and Chloe Santiago
The Student Excellence Award honors undergraduate or graduate students who demonstrate overall excellence and contributions to digital library practice.
The 2022 Student Excellence Award goes to Misha Coleman, Alexandra (Ali) Gunnells, and Chloe Santiago for their work on the project, “What is Digital Librarianship?”
Together, Chloe, Ali, and Misha interviewed seven librarians and archivists from the Texas Digital Library community about their daily work, professional backgrounds, and challenges. They coordinated, conducted, recorded, edited, transcribed, and published the interviews in TDL’s repository. Taken as a whole, the interviews provide an overview of the field of digital librarianship, demonstrate the variety of roles that digital librarians fill, and will serve as a valuable resource for promoting this area of library work. The interviews are available in TDL’s DSpace repository.
Chloe, Ali, and Misha are all recent graduates of UT Austin’s School of Information.
COMING SOON: TDL will be publishing the “What is Digital Librarianship” interviews on our YouTube channel.
TDL Service Award | Christina Chan-Park and Alexa Hight
The TDL Service Award is given at the discretion of the Texas Digital Library to an individual or group at a member institution doing exceptional work in the service of the Texas Digital Library consortium.
This year we are pleased to present the TDL Service Award to two of our members: Christina Chan-Park and Alexa Hight.
Dr. Christina Chan-Park is the STEM Librarian Coordinator at Baylor University. Christina has been indispensable to the growth of the Texas Data Repository Dataverse (TDR) and the strength of its Steering Committee in her term as BearData liaison.
When Christina served as chair of the Texas Data Repository Steering Committee (TDR SC) for Texas Digital Library, she kept our institutional liaisons and colleagues on task towards our collective goals. As leader of the Steering Committee’s Assessment group, she has led the creation of thorough and attractive usage reports for the collective TDR as well as for each individual institution. Using those reports and her deep knowledge of TDR SC projects, she has also led the creation of updates that TDL has provided to the Global Dataverse Community Consortium and the lead developers at Harvard for their annual meetings. Christina launched a comprehensive user survey that just recently concluded, and its results will help direct the TDR Steering Committee’s project roadmap as well as help refine the objectives of the global Dataverse community of users.
She delegated a logo redesign to designers at Baylor that is adaptable for all TDR member institutions and helped to oversee a student Capstone project to draft a Google Analytics user guide for the TDR. Finally, Christina does all of this despite the fact that, like many of our other institutional liaisons for the TDR, managing BearData represents less than 10% of her allocated responsibilities. Christina’s work with the Texas Data Repository has been of great value to TDL and contributes to the high esteem with which the global Dataverse community views our work.
Alexa Hight is the Scholarly Communication Librarian at Texas A&M – Corpus Christi and is an active participant and contributor to Texas Digital Library’s work across a number of different areas.
In addition to being an active member of TDL’s DSpace User Group and a past member of the TCDL planning committee, Alexa played an instrumental role in launching and serving as the inaugural chair of the TDL OJS User Group.
Alexa answered our call in 2020, when we determined there was a significant need within the community to better coordinate librarians working in library publishing efforts using TDL’s Open Journal Systems (OJS) academic journal-hosting service, and she concluded her term as chair in December of 2021. During her tenure, she oversaw the development of new resources for OJS users, including a new user guide. She also led an effort to write a book chapter on TDL’s collaborative service model for library publishing, to be included in the forthcoming Academic Libraries and Collaborative Research Services volume coming later this year from Rowman & Littlefield.
Alexa’s leadership and hard work have been instrumental to the success of the OJS User Group as a community of support, and have helped raise the profile of the Texas Digital Library within Texas libraries and throughout the library publishing community.
Get to know Alexa Hight and Dr. Christina Chan-Park.
Texas Digital Library thanks the 2022 TDL Awards subcommittee, chaired by Cynthia Henry of Texas Tech University, for its efforts in selecting the outstanding recipients of this year’s awards.
Congratulations to all of the 2022 TDL Awards winners!
Learn more about the TDL Awards and read about past years’ winners.