Our second virtual Texas Conference on Digital Libraries brought together over 200 librarians, archivists, technologists, students, and information professionals to hone skills, demonstrate new tools, and cultivate connections. All of us at Texas Digital Library found this year’s conference fun and inspiring, both in the creativity brought to our conference program and in the many ways our members and friends found community in the virtual conference space.
You can watch the conference sessions and poster presentations on YouTube and access conference materials in TDL’s DSpace repository.
Read more to relive a few highlights of this year’s conference, and thank you for joining us at TCDL!
Digital Juggling in Context
Understanding new tools, workflows, and collaboration skills for digital librarians and archivists can be difficult. Yet, somehow, the show must go on. This year’s conference theme, Digital Juggling, acknowledges that while we in libraries and archives do not work for a circus, we might feel like acrobats juggling projects and priorities and serving in multiple roles at work and at home.
The TCDL Planning Committee acknowledged that the virtual conference space can be just as rewarding – and just as exhausting – as an in-person conference. With that framework in mind, they planned a TCDL program that kept us engaged, inspired, and energized throughout the 3½ day conference.
Our community’s ability to adapt, adopt, and support each other helps us thrive under the big tent, and we brought it all together during TCDL 2022.
You can view all of the recorded sessions on our YouTube channel at the TCDL 2022 playlist, and be sure to check out this year’s posters while you’re there. You can also see the poster PDFs here.
COMING SOON: Texas Digital Library will share the TCDL 2022 Conference Proceedings.
Elaine Westbrooks
University librarian and vice provost for University Libraries (Jon Gardiner/UNC-Chapel Hill)
A Blueprint for Reckoning
TCDL guests had the honor of learning from Elaine L. Westbrooks, this year’s conference keynote speaker.
Elaine advanced from a cataloger as an early-career librarian to the position of Vice Provost for University Libraries and University Librarian at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. While in her role there, Elaine launched the Reckoning Initiative, establishing a framework to guide the University Libraries’ efforts to address inequality and promote racial equity, inclusion, and antiracism within their organization’s policies and through the work that they do.
In her keynote presentation, Elaine grounded our audience in the Reckoning framework through foundational lessons around the United States’ contemporary history of violence towards Black and Brown citizens. Elaine outlined her blueprint for UNC Libraries Reckoning Initiative alongside images of racist violence in Charlottesville and Washington D.C. and photos of communities grieving the murders of loved ones in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Buffalo, New York.
Through a mix of poetic imagery and a roadmap for how she evolved the Reckoning Initiative from idea to policy, Elaine instilled in our audience an urgent understanding of the drive to do more to influence positive changes – no matter how difficult.
You can watch Elaine’s keynote address on TDL’s YouTube channel.
Award-Winning Colleagues
We at Texas Digital Library are continually inspired by the amazing work going on within our member libraries and partner organizations throughout Texas and the region. We love to celebrate the work that furthers TDL’s mission of ensuring long term, equitable access to digital content of value to research, instruction, cultural heritage, and institutional memory.
Every year through the TDL Awards, we honor individuals and groups that have made outstanding contributions to the advancement of digital libraries and archives in various areas, including:
– Outreach
– Scholarly Communication
– Individual impact
– Service to the TDL consortium
– and Overall Excellence
We also honor students who are making a huge impact in the field, and a Trailblazer, who uses limited resources in innovative ways to support digital collections.
TDL is honored to play a part in facilitating some of that work, and the TDL Awards are an opportunity for us to recognize the labor, creativity, and expertise of the library and archives workers in our community. Read more about this year’s winners.
And, Yes, We [Actually] Juggled
… and meditated, and wrote, and learned how to better manage our finances. Because this year, instead of pens, sticky notes, and the “usual” conference swag, TCDL offered attendees what we hoped to be enriching, useful, and fun experiences. Our guests, speakers, and facilitators enjoyed engaging with a creative writing workshop, a session on meditation and art-making, a guide to financial literacy, and, naturally, a real, live juggling lesson (via Zoom).
This new “virtual” swag was a big success and we hope to offer enriching experiences for all of our conference-goers in the future.
With Thanks
TDL Members serve on the TCDL Planning Committee and work on the conference for ten months out of the year. Thanks to the outreach of the conference planning committee and TDL staff, this year’s TCDL was a huge success.
TCDL 2022 PLANNING COMMITTEE
Adrienne Cain, Baylor University
Mingyu Chen, University of Texas at Dallas
Lea DeForest, Texas Digital Library
Cynthia Henry, Texas Tech University
Bruce Herbert, Texas A&M University
Gabby Hernandez, University of Texas at Rio Grande Valley
Christina Kellum (vice-chair), University of North Texas
Diane López, University of Texas at San Antonio
Dianna Morganti, Texas A&M University
Adrian Shapiro, Texas Woman’s University
Thao Votang, University of Texas at Austin
Amanda Zerangue (chair), Texas Woman’s University
Until Next Time
Texas Digital Library hosts the Texas Conference on Digital Libraries annually. After two years in the virtual space, TDL hopes to host TCDL 2023 in person. Sign up for emails from Texas Digital Library so you never miss a TCDL update!
ABOUT the TDL
Texas Digital Library is a consortium of library and archives professionals that propels the Academy forward by maintaining our past and preparing for the future. Membership in TDL is open to any academic library. Find out more by visiting https://main.tdl.org/members/membership/ or email us at info@tdl.org.