TDL Award Winners

View previous award winners 2021 | 2020 | 2019 | 2018 | 2017 | 2016 | 2014

Each year, the Texas Digital Library Awards honor individuals and groups that have made outstanding contributions to the advancement of digital libraries. Winners are selected by the TDL Awards Committee and are notified in early spring.

Recognizing that the community benefits from the work of many, the TDL Awards seek to acknowledge, support, and celebrate work done in this area. Each year, the TDL Awards honor individuals and groups that have made outstanding contributions to the advancement of digital libraries. Digital libraries is defined broadly to include access to digital collections in academia as well as from allied organizations such as museums, archives, historical societies, and other cultural heritage institutions.

Below are this year’s TDL Awards winners.

2022 TDL Award Winners

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.

Screen share from the virtual 2022 TDL Awards Ceremony, honoring Margaret Culbertson and Michelle Johnson of the Hill Archive

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.

Hill Archive team performing object photography in the field

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.

Screen share from the virtual 2022 TDL Awards Ceremony, celebrating Dong Joon (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 Shensky

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.

Stephen Sloan

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.

Screen share from the virtual 2022 TDL Awards Ceremony, honoring Zhihong Xu

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?”

Screen share from the virtual 2022 TDL Awards Ceremony, recognizing Misha Coleman, Ali Gunnells, and Chloe Santiago

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.

Christina Chan-Park

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.

Alexa Hight

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!

2021 TDL Award Winners

The 2021 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.

Excellence Award | Houston Asian American Archive at Rice University

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 Houston Asian American Archive at Rice University.

Sherry Tseng Hill (b. 1957, Taiwan)
Forgive But Not Forget (2020)
Acrylic on Canvas, 48 x 18 in.
Donated by the artist.
Location: Woodson Research Center, Fondren Library, Rice University.

By Ann Shi, Associate Curator, Houston Asian American Archive

During the year of 2020, COVID pandemic struck the world and many are dealing with anxiety, stress and pain. The Houston Asian American Archive (HAAA) initiated a series of projects to respond to and archive human experiences, and provide a space of communal archive of stories, emotions, and healing, for the Rice community and beyond.

The HAAA is a digital scholarship project managed by Chao Center for Asian Studies, residing in Fondren Library, Rice University in 2010. HAAA is co-founded and managed by Dr. Anne Chao, adjunct faculty at the Department of History and Board of Trustees at Rice University. For over a decade, many scholars and talents have contributed to the success of the archive: Professor Tani Barlow, who helped conceive the project; Amanda Focke, Director of the Special Collection of the Woodson Research Center at the Fondren Library, is the Archivist of HAAA, who has meticulously and patiently catalogued our interviews and donated materials for eleven years; Katherine Shen, a volunteer who ensures that the interns ask the right and in-depth questions. Ann Shi, associate curator, whose vision for the archive to be more than a repository of oral interviews, and who gave color, imagination, and artistic direction to the archive.

In April 2020, the COVID-19 special collection‚ COVID Chronicles, was initiated to collect stories in the Asian American community about their experiences in and actions taken to fight the pandemic and protect others. To honor those who have been exerting themselves with an exceptional work ethic in this unprecedented situation, we have collected the stories of frontline workers, community leaders, volunteers, advocates and many others. We have also compiled interviews into playlists on our social media platform:

Salute Asian American Heroes: a curated collection to honor those who contributed in the health crisis.

COVID Chronicles: a broad-based collection for stories and experiences in the pandemic.

In June, the Racial Justice & Civic Engagement special collection was started to document stories and discussions about Black Lives Matter movement and other racial justice topics, as well as civic engagements on voting rights and its pressing matters before the election. This will be a collection ongoing as well as revisited in every election cycle.

“Dear Houston — Love, Asian America,” was started in February 2021 as an extension of the special collections, which focuses on Asian American’s love stories. It was initially inspired by the love-at-first-sight story of Beck Hong Gee (which was released on https://haaa.rice.edu/podcasts, a Valentine’s Day podcast directed by Ann Shi). Two HAAA interns, Sarah Kong and Helen Pu, both started their own oral history projects, the former on Asian food oral history, the latter on the networks of Chinese Christian Churches, will form upcoming episodes in this podcast.

In addition to oral histories, art has been invited to the Archive to further the mission of HAAA and to embody the voices in oral histories. Two public exhibitions, “Faces in the Pandemic” and “Portal of Healing: Crossing the Bridge Together” were curated by Ann Shi in fall 2020 and spring 2021. Both were community projects with open calls to engage the public, encouraging them to share their stories with the archive. In “Faces in the Pandemic”, portraits of 120 volunteers were mounted onto a narrow hallway in the Fondren Library, whose intense gazes created questions about their identities in diaspora. Ten Asian and Asian American artists made works during and in response to events in the pandemic to give voices to the Asian American community.

Faces in the Pandemic, 2020
Photo collage in 10 Panels, 48″ x 69″ each.
Courtesy of all 120 Volunteers

In “Portal of Healing: Crossing the Bridge Together”, of which the planning started in October 2020, again, open calls were casted for Asian American community to submit creative writings in the theme of grief, healing, human strife, and condolences. Working with Flipina American gestural painter, Rice Architecture School alumni, Rachel Gonzales, the HAAA interns led by Ann Shi, weaved out quotes from HAAA interviewees along with the open call submissions which included two poetries, one specifically made for the exhibition. Rachel inscribed these words in her calligraphy onto the immersive art installation. A performance on video by Rea Sampilo, manifesting the female body, the vitality of humanity, painted the air as a brush in the space of healing, embodying the experiences of the pandemic told by the voices in the oral history. The exhibition cohesively threaded the SallyPort of Rice campus, the space framed by feminist painter Dorothy Hood’s two ceiling-tall gestural canvases, and the Twilight Epiphany by James Turrell, symboling the endless tunneling of the healing energy into the female body, the female womb, and to the cosmic womb into the universe of the Skyspace. (Exhibition materials can be found here.)

For these contributions, I would consider HAAA worthy of nomination for the Excellence Award, and would appreciate the consideration from Texas Digital Library.

Portal of Healing: Crossing the Bridge Together, Installation, Photograph by Ann Shi

Trailblazer Award | JD Doyle Archives

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 JD Doyle Archives.

JD Doyle

By JD Doyle

The JD Doyle Archives (JDDoyleArchives.org) is a culmination of twenty years of work preserving LGBT history, in three different areas, and totaling over 18,000 web pages of content.

First was Queer Music Heritage, a radio show running from January 2000 until March 2015. It was both a radio show and a website, and the goal of both was to preserve and share the music of our culture. Each month’s page gives the playlist and additional pages of info, and you can stream or download every show. Although the programming has stopped the site will continue as a resource for the history of LGBT music. Over 580 hours of programming are archived. Covering almost every area of music, it documented the presence of LGBT musicians and singers, and their recordings, and this was done not only with monthly shows but visually showing images of the people, the albums, CDs, tapes, even 78 rpm records dating back to the 1920s, so a visual and audio history.

Special focus was always on music that was lyrically gay, telling our stories, documenting our histories, be it coming out, celebrating our pride, or mourning our losses to AIDS, with many theme shows covering different areas. Interviews with many of our musical pioneers were part of the series, some of whom are sadly now deceased. Special attention was shown to Women’s Music and that of Transgender artists. I wish I had had competition, as there is plenty of history to share, but this was the only radio show or website trying to capture and share the history of our music.

Under the QMH umbrellas was a second internet radio show, OutRadio, which satisfied my need to also showcase ‚ recent artists, again with many interviews allowing them to tell of their musical journeys. And also on the site are the episodes of Audiofile. That was a monthly music review segment carried by the radio newsmagazine This Way Out, lasting 14 years, from 1997 through the end of 2010. All segments are archived.

Spotts Park Rally photo below by Donn M

From the start I found my QMH site a place to share the extensive information I have on Female Impersonation, mostly vintage, and including a music discography of those singing drag queens. There is a wide variety, including drag scrapbooks, sheet music, club programs, postcards, and memorabilia. It is itself one of the largest resources on the internet of this area of the culture.

QMH101.com is a special project of my radio show and website Queer Music Heritage. It was designed as sort of a study guide, or lesson plan, and the hope was for it to appeal to those LGBT Studies courses now found at many universities around the country. I recognized that the music history was missing from most courses, and decided to make filling that need possible. A number of professors of those courses have reported back to me of the successful use of that project.

I have always been interested in others queer history areas, but around 2014 I felt the need to close down the (very time intensive) radio efforts in order to devote my energies to two other areas. So next was the website Houston LGBT History, which (still growing) is a resource of mostly Houston history, but also ample areas of Statewide focus, like gay & lesbian publications of Dallas, Austin, San Antonio and other Texas cities. My digital publication efforts have been ambitious, including (just one example) digitizing all 1518 issues of the statewide magazine This Week in Texas (1975-2013), which in a way covered the cultural lifeblood of gay life in the state.

Separate sections of that site cover my Three P’s: Publications, Politics and Pride, and they and others on Bars, Businesses, Organizations, Events, People and more display thousands of clippings from the publications, organized chronologically to enable logical research in many areas of the culture. I have often been told by writers that they could not have done an article on our history that they had published without my site as a resource.

Love is a Drag, Lace Records, 1962

The History site is also host to a project that is both a pop-up museum of Houston LGBT history and an organized website. The Banner Project has a striking visual display that is used annually at the University of Houston and it has been featured at a number of galas and events. It is found at HoustonWeHaveHistory.org, which includes essays on the subject of each banner.

A third large and growing resource is the Texas Obituary Project, a searchable database showing obituaries (from gay publications and a variety of sources) for those LGBT Texans we have lost. Of course a large percent of the almost 7500 obituaries were due to AIDS, but there is no criteria on the cause of death, and entries are coded with tags (AIDS, violence, Black, Latino, female, and now, COVID). So, a researcher could look for the number of AIDS deaths in Dallas in 1993, or chart the deaths due to violence (whether gay-bashing/murder or in a relationship). In 2018 the Houston Chronicle did a front-page article on this website, which also captured the poignant means that it has given many people closure in mourning their loved ones.

In 2019 I was notified that the Library of Congress has selected my websites for inclusion in the materials related to LGBTQ+ studies. I am very honored by this, as it means my work will be preserved long into the future.

I hope by example my work demonstrates to other historians and archives ways to capture, organize and display specific histories. Although not affiliated with the University of Houston, I work closely with representatives of their LGBT Resource Center, and often borrow and digitize publications from their collection, making the files available online generally for the first time. And I make frequent donations of materials to their holdings.

Outreach Award | UT El Paso Institute of Oral History

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 UT El Paso Institute of Oral History.

Braceros Waiting in Line, Rio Vista Processing Center
(Photo Courtesy of USCIS History Library)

By Yolanda Leyva, Associate Professor of History, Department of History, UTEP

I am pleased to nominate The University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) Institute of Oral History (IOH) for the Texas Digital Library Outreach Award. The IOH is the largest repository of border-related oral histories in the United States. In the past three years, Dr. Meredith E. Abarca (affiliated faculty) and the IOH team created three video projects based on oral histories with the goals of reaching a broader audience and informing people about our digital collection. The videos have reached a wide audience as evidenced by the number of views on our platforms, which include Vimeo, YouTube, and a website dedicated to Dr. Abarca’s project, El Paso Food Voices. Links are below, following this narrative.

The IOH and Special Collections of the UTEP Library have collaborated for decades to make our oral histories accessible through the library. Early on, students and community members visited the Library in person to access transcripts and audio. Beginning in 2009, the Library began to provide access to our collection through a searchable database, first Digital Commons and now Scholar Works. It has been a very fruitful collaboration. Last year, people downloaded our oral histories 22,232 times.

Scholars and students have consulted our collection extensively over the past five decades to write about border history, immigration, Mexican Americans, West Texas, and historical events such as the WWII-era Bracero Program. We are dedicated to expanding our audience to the broader public and K-12 educators and for the past several years we have sought creative ways to makes the stories in our collection accessible to these audiences by creating video projects available online.

Bracero Oral History Project, UT El Paso Institute of Oral History

This nomination features three digital oral projects: Voices from the Border (2018-2019), El Paso Food Voices (2018- present), and ‚La Frontera Speaks (2020- present). Each project uses oral history as the core element, combining it with contemporary and historic photographs, and writing and narration by scholars.

The oral histories in our collection are wide-ranging thematically and chronologically. The earliest interviews, from the 1960s and 1970s, feature interviewees who were born in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. An older oral history project, Bracero Archive, amassed hundreds of interviews with men who entered the United States as braceros, temporary workers who came to the U.S. in agriculture and various industries beginning in World War II. Our collection contains oral histories that speak about educational history, migration, entrepreneurship, and daily life on the border. Since 2018, El Paso Food Voices has contributed oral histories that focus on the knowledge, practices, and memories about the food of El Paso’s people. These stories reveal a city’s living history, which is made up of diverse populations, a past with roots spreading in multiple directions, and a dynamic and ever-changing present.

The inaugural video for our Voices from the border series focused on education. In July 2016, we conducted oral histories with several people who had attended segregated so-called Mexican schools in El Paso in the 1950s- 1970s. Ranging in age from their 50s to their 80s, they discussed what it was like to attend school at a time when there was widespread discrimination against Mexican American students. The video is available here.The video has over 600 views to date. Two videos featuring oral histories with former braceros followed. In 2016, in preparation for the 75th anniversary of the beginning of the Bracero program in 1942, we began interviewing former braceros, contributing to an already existing collection. The videos draw from both projects. They may be viewed here(1008 views to date) and here (204 views to date).

Another example of a video from the Voices of the Border series is Uncaged Art. While our collection is historical, we also understand that the present is filled with historical issues. In April 2019, the IOH debuted a museum exhibit of artwork by migrant Central American children who had been detained in an emergency influx center under the US Department of Health and Human Services. They were asylum seekers from Central America who had been either separated from their families through the Zero Tolerance policy of the former administration or had crossed the border alone. Our video includes comments by Freddy, (not his real name), a young Honduran who had been detained in the influx center the previous year. It may be viewed here(477 views to date). Another video, Save Duranguito, is based on oral histories with residents and former residents of El Paso’s first neighborhood that is slated for demolition by the City of El Paso. (248 views to date).

Cardboard Cathedral, “Uncaged Art”
(Photo Courtesy of Ivan Pierre Aguirre for NYTimes)

In 2020, we inaugurated ‚La Frontera Speaks. Each oral history is attached to two videos. One combines context written by a scholar along with excerpts from the oral history. A second related video highlights the same history while providing additional historical context. We created our first two videos from an oral history with Juan Virgen Diaz, a former bracero who came to the United States as a teenager in 1961. The videos may be viewed here https://vimeo.com/483809466 and here https://vimeo.com/489130798. Currently, we have videos in production featuring an interviewee who worked as a clerk at a Bracero processing center in the early 1950s, telling the little-known story of Mexican American women who worked in the Bracero processing centers. We are also producing videos based on an oral history of a woman talking about the lifelong significance of creosote (an important plant in our desert). The scholar for that video is writing her dissertation on the history of creosote. These videos tell the rich and varied history of people on the border and their relationship to international, national, and local events as well as their everyday lives.

El Paso Food Voices collects food stories from home cooks, professional chefs, restaurant owners, educators, and others to learn about our city’s culinary landscape, its histories, cultures, environments, politics, and economics. Each video is created and produced from an oral history conducted by Meredith E. Abarca. Each video is arranged thematically based on topics gathered from an individual’s story. These have ranged from introducing Mexican ingredients to East Indian cooking, reminiscing about long gone El Paso eateries; being born with a cooking gene; reclaiming ancestral foods. The collection also includes recipes created by El Paso residents that range from Sweet Potato Pie,Hot and Spicy Vegetable Curry, to Nohpalli Fruit Salad. As a collection gathered in a YouTube channel, these videos have 455 views to date. You may view videos here: Parul Haribhai’s The Foodie Gene‚ Roman Wilcox’s ‚ Cooking with Intention and Responsibility.

We are especially proud that these digital projects telling the stories and histories of border people are the work of a collaboration among faculty, doctoral students, MA students, undergraduate students, and staff. One of our videographers and our MA research assistant are funded through the Mellon EPCC-UTEP Humanities Collaborative, creating a relationship between the El Paso Community College and our university. Digital projects have the potential to create greater access to our collection of oral histories, to provide new resources for educators K-12 and higher education, and to encourage people to record their own stories.

Contributors to the digital projects

Dr. Yolanda Chavez Leyva, Department of History

Dr. Meredith Abarca, Department of English

Kimberly Sumano Ortega, doctoral candidate, Department of History

Ligia Arguilez, doctoral candidate, Department of History

Luis Garcia, MA student, Department of English

Juan Jose Vargas, undergraduate student, Department of Communications

Solomon Contreras, undergraduate student, El Paso Community College

Vianey Alejandra Zavala, manager, Institute of Oral History

Denise Amparan, administrative assistant, Institute of Oral History

Links

UTEP Institute of Oral History Vimeo

UTEP El Paso Food Voices website

Student Excellence Award | Glory Turnbull, St. Mary’s University

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 Glory Turnbull.

By Lindsey Wieck, Assistant Professor and Director of Public History, St. Mary’s University

Glory Turnbull

Glory Turnbull (they/them), a combined degree student in Public History (pursuing undergraduate and graduate degrees simultaneously, has been a key member of our project team in the Old Spanish Trail (OST) digitization project since August 2019. During that time, Glory has contributed to a three-student team who have scanned and produced metadata for the nearly 2000 items in the collection. Over and above these responsibilities, Glory helped smooth out our workflow, trained additional undergraduates to produce metadata, and developed a physical and digital version of an exhibit that used these materials. They are currently working to add projects created by undergraduate and graduate students to the archive website to preserve and share this work with others.

This project digitized the Old Spanish Trail (OST) collection, held by the Blume Library at St. Mary’s University [StMU], for the Old Spanish Trail’s centennial celebrations (2015-2029). The digitization of these resources will enable the integration of these primary sources in classrooms and support scholarly research throughout the nation. The collection is significant not only to the history of San Antonio, but also to the entire region, because it linked cities from St. Augustine, Florida to San Diego, California. The OST was built in the 1910s and 1920s as an automobile route. A major waypoint in this coast-to-coast route was San Antonio, Texas where the Old Spanish Trail Association headquarters were located. The association promoted the development of an auto highway throughout the South. The highway encouraged commerce, economic development and social connections among former Spanish colonies that have, to this day, a substantial Hispanic population. The OST had a major impact on the region, including on the development of tourism, highway development, and the built environment of the South.

Digital Archive: Glory played a key role in digitizing the materials and preparing them for upload online. The metadata Glory produced was consistent, clear, and useful. With Glory’s hard work, we were able to successfully scan and organize 100% of the materials in this archival collection. We have currently completed metadata on more than 95% of the items in this collection. We launched the digital archive at https://omeka.stmarytx.edu/ost.

Digital and Physical Exhibit: Glory produced a traveling exhibit that will engage the public in cities along the OST from Florida to California in partnership with the Old Spanish Trail 100 [OST 100], an organization formed in 2004 to recognize and celebrate the 100th anniversary of the OST. Glory also produced a digital version of the exhibit to ensure that it’s accessible to all, wherever they are in the world. As part of the research for this exhibit, Glory contacted experts on the OST and its history to find images, clarify questions, and do additional research. In this work, Glory addressed tough questions including the following: Who was the targeted audience of the OST’s boosterism? Who benefitted from this increase of travelers? What were the racial implications of invoking a romanticized vision of the Spanish past? How were these racial ideas inscribed into the landscape of the OST? In these final products, they tackled tough questions like these while also thoughtfully discussing these topics so as not to isolate OST enthusiasts. Notably, Glory persisted in producing this project throughout the challenges COVID-19 presented to them and to other students. The digital exhibit can be found here: https://omeka.stmarytx.edu/omeka-s/s/ost/page/exhibit-landing. A copy of the physical exhibit is in the attachments section.

Further Related Work: Approximately 100 undergraduate and graduate students in Dr. Teresa Van Hoy’s courses this fall produced mini-research projects using OST materials digitized in this project. Glory produced an OST timeline for one of these courses. Glory is currently working to build a student project showcase that will make all of these projects accessible to researchers, OST enthusiasts, and students throughout the U.S. and beyond.

Career Goals: Glory noted that this project helped them achieve marketable skills in archiving and digitization that moves them toward long-term career goals: These skills put me ahead of my undergraduate peers, and this project is the primary reason I was able to land a Collections internship [last] summer. I learned how to work with and train other students, and I’ve even taken a tentative step into curation and exhibit text writing. Glory has used this project to develop valuable skills and projects for their portfolio, taking advantage of all of the opportunities available to learn, grow, and contribute to this project. Currently finishing an M.A. in Public History (Spring 2021 graduation), Glory is sure to continue to use these skills in their next steps as a student of archives and records management beginning Fall 2021. They hope to become an archivist or museum professional in the future.

Overall, Glory has been an essential member of this project team, taking on responsibilities beyond their peers. Glory’s work ethic, attention to detail, and contextualization skills have ensured this project has had a successful result. Without Glory’s contributions, this project would lack much of the rich context infused throughout the archive and exhibit.

Scholarly Communication Award | Taylor Davis-Van Atta, University of Houston Libraries

This year’s recipient of the Scholarly Communications Award is Taylor Davis-Van Atta, Director of the Digital Research Commons at University of Houston Libraries.

Taylor Davis-Van Atta

By Anne Washington, University of Houston Libraries

Taylor Davis Van Atta is most deserving of the TDL Scholarly Communication Award for his leadership in transforming UH Libraries scholarly communication services and support. His achievements include significantly growing University of Houston (UH)‚ open access repositories; championing UH Libraries services across campus; and creatively engaging UH colleges and programs to make thousands of student and faculty works openly available.

Taylor joined the University of Houston Libraries in 2017 as the Digital Scholarship Coordinator and in 2020, was promoted to the Director of the Director of the Digital Research Commons. In his roles, he has been, and remains, a driving force behind expanding scholarly communication services for UH faculty and students.

Two of Taylor’s earliest initiatives laid the foundation for expanded services at the libraries: 1) Building out the necessary infrastructure, the Cougar ROAR (Repositories for Open Access), to support scholars in depositing and sharing their open works, and 2) Establishing a CV service at the libraries as a mediate way to deposit faculty works into the IR.

-Cougar ROAR

While UH Libraries used TDL-hosted DSpace as its IR since about 2013, it contained only Electronic Theses and Dissertations. After some initial exploration into the expansion of the IR to include other works, Taylor, as part of the Cougar ROAR project, further established infrastructure for supporting open scholarship and invited in early campus partners. By the end of the project, the Cougar ROAR team had: 1. Established a single page launchpad to our Dataverse repository and our DSpace institutional repository

(https://guides.lib.uh.edu/roar), 2. Created policies and guides for these repositories, 3. Compiled feedback from faculty on these services and materials, 4. Created marketing materials for our services, 5. Started early conversations with UH colleges and departments about scholarly communication services, and 6. Created a roadmap for future open access initiatives.

-Establishing a CV Service

Learning from focus groups with faculty, current literature, and from colleagues in the field, Taylor found that the most likely way we would increase the amount of content in the IR is to follow a mediated submission model. What he brought to life is a service for interested faculty to submit their CV to Libraries staff, who would then locate and upload acceptable versions of the articles to the IR: Assisted Institutional Repository Submissions (https://libraries.uh.edu/research/ir-assist/). He worked in close collaboration with the metadata team to develop sustainable processes to support this service, which is now mainly staffed by student employees. Through this services, we’ve added hundreds of open access articles, posters, presentations, and more.

Taylor built off of the momentum of these initiatives, deepening his relationships with faculty tapped for earlier adoption and forging new relationships with UH programs, departments, and colleges. Taylor championed the use of the IR for a wider breadth of materials including audio/video from UH programs, student research events, and other capstone projects. Because of Taylor’s outreach, we now regularly add hundreds of works to the IR from different programs and events including: the College of Nursing Spring Forum, Undergraduate Research Day posters, Senior Honors Theses, and the Moores School of Music recital recordings (see the full list here in the UH Faculty, Staff, and Student Works collection: https://uh ir.tdl.org/handle/10657/21). The impact of this work cannot be overstated; he was instrumental in centering the IR as a platform for open access works at UH.

Taylor continues to champion Open Access at UH through his ongoing outreach to UH departments and colleges; collaboration with Ariana Santiago, UH Libraries‚ Open Educational Resources Coordinator; and his leadership in Digital Research Services as the Director of the Digital Research Commons. He advocates for fair licensing agreements and for practices that make data and research products openly available and reusable.

These achievements are impressive, of course, but it’s so critical that we also recognize our colleagues that make our working lives better, and Taylor is one of those people. He is a thoughtful collaborator, an advocate for his teams, and what I appreciate most is how he empowers his colleagues and every member of his project

teams. He has supreme confidence in his students and colleagues, which drives creativity and leads to impressive results. Taylor finds ways to bring people into collaborative work and makes it easy for everyone to shine in their strengths. He creates opportunities for staff and students to drive process improvements and is always sure to acknowledge their contributions. Not only does Taylor share his expertise and collaborative spirit with UH, he is actively involved in organizations such as TDL and ACRL. I cannot think of a more deserving individual for the TDL Scholarly Communication Award.

Individual Impact Award | Julianna Barrera-Gomez

This year’s Individual Impact winner is Julianna Barrera-Gomez, Digital Archivist at University of Texas at San Antonio.

Julianna Barerra-Gomez

By Amy Rushing, Assistant Dean for Special Collections,University of Texas at San Antonio Libraries Special Collections

Through openness, approachability, enthusiasm for collaboration, and willingness to share her valuable knowledge and expertise, Julianna has made a positive impact on the digital curation community, particularly in Texas.

As a member of the TDL Texas Archivematica Users Group (A-TEX) Steering Committee, Julianna plays an influential role in leading digital preservation efforts, decisions, and practices at UTSA and throughout Texas. She has played a key role in helping plan in-person meetings and networking events, answering questions, and contributing her expertise through panels and webinars. She has a distinctive situation and unique experiences to share with the TDL community, particularly in the area of digital preservation. As the only longstanding administrator of the ArchivesDirect digital preservation platform in Texas, Julianna’s knowledge and expertise have both informed and influenced the A-TEX steering committee’s efforts in serving the Archivematica community around the state. She has presented on her work numerous times in different venues which has impacted many local preservation decisions within the community.

At UTSA, Julianna spearheaded the formation of the Libraries Digital Stewardship Governance Group. Governance Group members are mainly non-archivists from every area in the Libraries who have a role in creating or managing digital content. Julianna’s leadership is helping the Libraries build a collective knowledge of the challenges and considerations in digital preservation so that this knowledge doesn’t just reside in Special Collections. She presents digital preservation concepts in an accessible way and provides real-world, relatable examples that are easily digestible by colleagues who do not work in the digital curation field.

Through her service, Julianna makes significant contributions in building a sense of unity and purpose. She is an advocate for smaller institutions that are often operating with restricted resources like small staff sizes, a lack of specialized expertise, inadequate technical infrastructures, and/or limited budgets.

She is currently co-chair of the Texas Archival Resources Online (TARO) Standards Committee. Julianna exhaustively researched metadata standards to empower software developers, as well as other TARO committees, to capitalize on the new website’s ability to make finding aids even more discoverable. This led to detailed revisions of TARO’s EAD Best Practice Guide. She also helped lead the charge on laying groundwork for TARO’s conversion to EAD3.

TDL Service Award | Colleen Lyon, Dianna Morganti, John Watts, and Jessica Trelogan

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.

Screen share from the virtual 2021 TDL Awards Ceremony

This year we are pleased to recognize Colleen Lyon, Dianna Morganti, John Watts, and Jessica Trelogan.

By Courtney Mumma

Each year, the Texas Digital Library honors a winner from among our TDL members (an individual or a group) who have made outstanding and meaningful contributions to the TDL consortium and its members. The 2021 recipient of the 2021 Texas Digital Library Service Award, the Carpentries Pilot Project Team. They are Dianna Morganti at Texas State University, Colleen Lyon and Jessica Trelogan at UT Austin, and John Watts at Texas A&M University.Their collaborative work on the foundation, management, and assessment of the TDL Carpentries pilot has been exemplary. Training Carpentries instructors from among our TDL member institutions will serve to expand data expertise across Texas and the region. TDL is grateful for your efforts in leading this project from start to finish – from proposing the Carpentries pilot to TDL’s Governing Board and coordinating the launch and equitable selection of trainees, to building a community of instructors, hosting and organizing several workshops, and laying the groundwork for continued Carpentries engagement in Texas.Congratulations Colleen, Dianna, Jessica and John, for your service to TDL!

We would also like to recognize our nominees for the 2021 TDL Awards

COVID-19: The Hilltop Perspective, St. Edwards University
C.L. Sonnichsen Special Collections Department, The University of Texas at El Paso Library/Fanny Zlabovsky – National Council of Jewish Women Case Files Digitization Project
William J. Hill Texas Artisans and Artists Archive
Archiving for the Future: An Open Educational Resource
University of North Texas Digital Libraries’ Digital Newspaper Unit
Voices of SMU Oral History Collection
Darryl Stuhr, Director of Digitization and Digital Preservation, Baylor University Libraries
Darryl Tocker, The Tocker Foundation
Annie Wu,Head, Metadata and Digitization Services, University Libraries, University of Houston
Cushing Library / Bryan + College Station Public Library System Summer Reading Program digital scavenger hunt
Stephen Sloan, Waco History App
Constitutions of Texas, 1824-1876, Tarlton Law Library
Scholarly Impact Service, University of North Texas Libraries
Emily Vinson, University of Houston Libraries Special Collections
Austin Museum of Popular Culture Digital Retooling

2020 TDL Award Winners

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 | 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.

SAAACAM brings story time to the Carver Library 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 .

Bringing San Antonio’s history to life: SAAACAM’s Black Cowboy Rodeo Time, February 2020

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 has a free mobile app

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.

Opening of first exhibits at San Antonio International Airport – 1000 Faces, Portraits in Gold, Cattle Brands

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

Texas Film Round Up in Laredo

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.

Example of educational initiatives by the Texas Archive of the Moving Image

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.

Texas Archive of the Moving Image (TAMI) 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.

TAMI sends volunteers all over the state to collect materials

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.

Explore TAMI’s collections at www.texasarchive.org

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.

Followers of @atx_barrio_archive discover memories of loved ones and local events

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.

ATX Barrio Archive display at the 2020 Lone Star Zine Fest

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

Dr. Deidre (DeDe) Rios, Director of Optometric & Clinical Library Services at the University of Incarnate Word

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.

Optometric Clinical Practice, an open access journal run by Dr. Rios

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

Anne Washington

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 presenting at JCDL 2019

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 (left) with the former UH Dean of Libraries, Lisa German

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.

Anne (left) with Annie Wu (her supervisor) at DCMI 2019 in Seoul

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 (second from right) with the Metadata Team at 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 accepting her award for the Bridge2Hyku project

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

Chris Starcher is the Associate Librarian for Digital Resources at Texas Tech University

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!

2020 TDL Awards Committee

Texas Digital Library thanks the 2020 TDL Awards Committee, comprised of TDL members from around the state of Texas, for its efforts in selecting this year’s group of outstanding recipients.

Sean Buckner (chair), Texas A&M University
Elle Covington, University of Texas at Austin
Lea DeForest, Texas Digital Library (non-voting)
Lauren Goodley (vice-chair), Texas State University
Elizabeth Headrick, Texas Woman’s University
Alexa Hight, Texas A&M University – Corpus Christi
DeeAnn Ivie, University of Texas at San Antonio
Christina Kellum, University of North Texas
Bethany Scott, University of Houston
Adrian Shapiro, Texas Woman’s University
Zach Valdes, Sam Houston State University

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 Sign up for newsletters
2020 EXCELLENCE AWARD WINNER
LGBTQ Archive University of North Texas Libraries Facebook: @unt.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 UT Austin School of Information
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

2019 TDL Award Winners

The 2019 awards winners represent a variety of institutions and projects. Digital humanities, digital preservation, digital scholarship, and open access projects 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.

Excellence Award | The 3Dhotbed Project

The 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 3Dhotbed Project.

Project Team Members

Courtney Jacobs, Head of Outreach and Community Engagement, University of California – Los Angeles
Marcia McIntosh, Digital Production Librarian, University of North Texas
Kevin O’Sullivan, Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts, Texas A&M University

The 3Dhotbed Project (an acronym for “3D-Printed History of the Book Education”) harnesses maker culture to advance book history instruction by providing open-access 3D data through a digital library platform.

Initiated by professionals from the University of North Texas, Texas A&M University, and the University of California Los Angeles, 3Dhotbed has created 3D-printable models of tools necessary to perform effective instruction related to the history of the book.

The 3Dhotbed Project operates in the spirit of maker culture as a peer-led, networked learning experience made possible through existing advancements in digital libraries and community partnerships within the international bibliographic community. The project provides an approachable model which demonstrates how existing digital infrastructures built to house 2D digital objects can be effectively leveraged towards the growing demand for 3D data.

The impact of this is significant: these technologies benefit institutions and scholars by making cultural artifacts more widely available, without requiring the renovation of ones’ digital archiving system. Thus, their project has fostered a more dynamic and inclusive community of practice.

Marcia McIntosh (pictured above), Digital Production Librarian at the University of North Texas, accepted the Excellence Award on behalf of the project team.

Trailblazer Award | The Inside Books Project

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 aems emswiler, Archival Fellow with the Inside Books Project.

Inside Books Project (IBP) collective members train volunteers how to read and respond to incarcerated people’s book requests, of which they receive over 2,000 per month. Since its’ founding in 1998, incarcerated people who have received reading materials from Inside Books have sent back art, cards, writings, testimonies, crafts and other materials as a thank-you for the books and as an outlet of expression. These materials have been used for art shows, fundraising, sharing on social media, and small newsletter publications.

In 2015, with the support of Dr. Charlotte Nunes in her capacity as Fellow in Digital Scholarship at Southwestern University, aems emswiler began preserving and digitizing materials submitted to IBP and uploading them to Omeka. The project expanded in 2017, with the help of the Texas After Violence Project and their archivist Jane Field.

The partnership between Inside Books and the Texas After Violence Project allowed aems to digitize over 2,000 documents, including the submissions from incarcerated people as well as hundreds of book censorship forms from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) to the Inside Books digital archive.

The IBP Archive prioritizes the voices of those most impacted by systems of violence, such as women, Black, Brown, queer, trans, Indigenous, disabled and neurodivergent people. However, all submissions are accepted and preserved in the physical collection.

This archive is testimony to the ways the prison system targets particular narratives for censorship and disposal. For example, the collection includes Texas Department of Criminal Justice administrative documents banning Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde, The Color Purple by Alice Walker, The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, and Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.

Another working collection traces the impacts of this censorship, featuring letters from people who were denied books. Educational, legal, health, and cultural texts that are banned have a huge impact on individuals denied that information.

Public access to these collections will help inform the public on infringements of incarcerated people’s constitutional rights, literacy needs in prisons, barriers to education, violence experienced by marginalized communities, and other pertinent issues around incarceration in Texas.

The archive project would not be possible without the labor of many individuals who keep IBP running week to week, answering book requests, training volunteers, and up-keeping the library of donated materials. To learn more about volunteering at IBP, donating to operating costs or books, see insidebooksproject.org or email insidebooksproject@gmail.com

You can view the collection at https://insidebooksart.omeka.net/. Currently many items are private as consent and citation details are being re-worked and individual’s names are being redacted on banned books forms; in the upcoming months more of these items will be publicly accessible.

Others who have contributed labor to the IBP Archive include Lucas Marshall, Natasha Haggard, Erin Birney, and Sea D’amico. To learn more about the IBP Archive or to get involved, please email aems@texasafterviolence.org.

Outreach Award | The Dallas Way

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 Dallas Way.

Project Team Members:

Robert Emery, Founding member, The Dallas Way
De’An Roper, President, The Dallas Way
Nino Testa, Associate Director, Women & Gender Studies, Texas Christian University

The mission of The Dallas Way is to gather, organize, store, and present the complete LGBTQ history of Dallas, Texas. Founded in 2011, The Dallas Way has led the effort to gather and preserve the untold and under-told stories of LGBTQ Dallas, through the collection and preservation of historical archives, the capturing of video and audio recordings of personal oral histories of individuals, the collecting and publishing of the written stories of Dallas-area LGBT organizations and members of the LGBTQ community, and the public speaking presentations of personal stories as told by individuals from within the LGBTQ community and by the many dedicated allies of our community, all of which are archived and accessible through our website and the Portal to Texas History.

Every day, they post one image to an archival Instagram account that shares the diverse history of LGBTQ Dallas. These curated posts draw from archival materials accessible through the Portal to Texas History, their website, and other online sources. By normalizing the encounter with LGBTQ history, they encourage our followers to explore the rich digital archives that are available at their fingertips.

The most rewarding engagement comes from people who ask questions or share historical information about the content we post. Sometimes, these comments result in more accurate or updated information about an archival image that we then collect and plan to share with UNT so that they can update metadata on the Portal to Texas History. This project reaches parts of LGBTQ Dallas that would otherwise never engage with The Dallas Way or with the LGBTQ history of the city.

In addition to being important contributions to the preservation of LGBTQ history, these initiatives help to strengthen our outreach to the community itself and encourage engagement with our diverse and ever-growing digital collections and archives.

Robert Emery (pictured above), Co-Founder & Advisory Committee member of The Dallas Way, accepted the Outreach Award on behalf of the project team.

Student Excellence Award | Elizabeth Irvin-Stravoski

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 Elizabeth Irvin-Stravoski.

Elizabeth is a Graduate Assistant at the University of Houston Libraries’ Digital Research Commons.

Since February 2018, the Digital Research Commons has collaborated with 17 departments, 5 colleges, and 29 faculty members to support the development of library-sponsored projects, host guest lectures, and provide hands-on workshops covering an array of digital research tools, skills, and competencies. Central to the productivity and the sustainability of the DRC is the work of our graduate student.

The Graduate Assistant position, as originally posted, requires the graduate student to staff the Commons during its open hours and maintain records of Commons’s use and user requests. Additionally, the assistant also offers limited project management for the Digital Research Common’s sponsored projects. Elizabeth, however, has served the Commons in ways that extend far above and beyond the responsibilities articulated in her job description. She has quickly grown into an essential element of DRC operations in administrative, research, and educational capacities. Elizabeth has been a foundational and stabilizing presence in the DRC nearly since its inception. Over her time serving as both Project Manager and Assistant to the Director of the DRC, she has expertly drawn on her own academic and research expertise as well as her fifteen years experience as a nurse practitioner to develop project management standards and protocols for sponsored projects.

When Elizabeth finds evidence of a demonstrated need that is not being met, or an area where additional expertise is needed, she takes it upon herself to learn and, in turn, teach that skill. Most recently, she has learned and applied basic TEI in order to assist one of our English faculty in the early stages of developing a digital edition of the translation of a medieval text. This kind of initiative is vital to diversifying and expanding DRC offerings that support a robust and growing digital scholarship program in UH Libraries.

Over the past year, Elizabeth has provided key service and expertise to mission critical objectives for the Digital Research Commons, taking on the work of a full-time professional with humility and grace.

Scholarly Communication Award | DeeAnn Ivie

DeeAnn showing off one of her favorite psych books, “Face Value” by Alexander Todorov on UTSA Libraries Twitter feed.

This year’s recipient of the Scholarly Communications Award is DeeAnn Ivie, Open Educational Resources Coordinator at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

As OER Coordinator, DeeAnn works with campus constituents to grow open educational resources adoption at UTSA. Since 2016, DeeAnn has served as administrator of the program, working in direct support of our library Dean, and in direct partnership with our team of subject specialists to advocate for OER adoption, providing support for a total of 47 faculty grants with cumulative and projected student savings of $6 million and a return on investment of $72 for every dollar invested in the program.

That is, for every $1 the library has awarded to faculty teaching courses that are adopting free and low- cost learning materials through the grant program, students have saved $72 in textbook costs.

DeeAnn has lead several major OER expansion efforts at UTSA this past year. Ensuring UTSA’s alignment with Texas Senate Bill 810 through the implementation of a low-cost textbook filter in the course search is one of the most impactful, helping our students more easily find courses using free and low cost learning materials. DeeAnn is continuing to work with UTSA Advising and Orientation Programs to market the filter to students through campus social media outlets, orientation fairs, and individual advisor/student meetings.

In March 2018, DeeAnn also partnered with UTSA student government to crowd-fund for the OER program, raising $1,500 in additional funds for faculty transitioning from traditional textbooks to free and low cost textbooks.

Individual Impact | Bethany Scott

This year’s Individual Impact winner is Bethany Scott, Coordinator of Digital Projects at the University of Houston.

At UH Special Collections, Bethany has mentored students and young professionals and given them challenging and productive opportunities to gain experience and explore career paths in digital scholarship and digital curation.

Bethany is currently supervising an undergraduate fellow from an underrepresented population in the Association of Research Libraries’ Fellowship for Digital and Inclusive Excellence and providing this student with learning opportunities along the digital scholarship continuum from acquisition of born digital resources and digitization of analog originals through online presentation and digital preservation.

Bethany also supervises a volunteer intern doing a practicum project for her Digital Curation Program at Johns Hopkins University. Together, they are working to update and create digital preservation workflows and procedures at UH. Bethany also collaborated closely and mentored a Special Collections staff member in digital preservation, curation, description, and exhibition.

Bethany chairs A-Tex, the Archivematica Users Group in Texas, and helped coordinate last year’s Archivematica Camp at UH Libraries.

Bethany’s work in UH Libraries has moved the Libraries’ understanding and capabilities forward a great deal. She is a close collaborator with other units in the Libraries, and has successfully led efforts to implement Archivematica as the Libraries’ digital preservation standard. She worked with content curators, metadata librarians, developers, and administrators to create the technical hardware and software infrastructure for Archivematica, and devised workflows and tools for packaging digital content for ingestion into the tool.

Bethany has made a significant regional impact on digital scholarship and digital curation through her work and TDL is proud to present you with our Individual Impact Award.

TDL 2019 Service Award | James Creel

This year we are pleased to recognize James Creel (pictured above) of Texas A&M University Libraries with this award for his significant contributions over many years to our DSpace and Vireo communities within TDL.

In recent years, James’ leadership in coordinating development of Vireo 4 has been essential to the (near) completion of that project. He is generous with his time and expertise and patient with TDL as we’ve worked to return to a position of greater technology leadership and participation with Vireo.

But James’ collaboration with TDL on both DSpace and Vireo goes back much farther. He has been a consistent leader within our community since at least 2008, when he co-presented for the first time at the Texas Conference on Digital Libraries (TCDL) on the Manakin XML user interface for DSpace.

A slide from James’ 2008 TCDL presentation, “Embedding A Digital Repository within the Texas A&M University Library Web Services”

Over many years, James has been a generous colleague, leading multiple thorough and precise training workshops on advanced DSpace topics — including this year at TDL’s DSpace User Group meeting, where he led a workshop on advanced methods of repository ngest — and a source of deep expertise that we and other members value and can rely on.

We thank you for your service to your fellow Texas Digital Library members, James.

2019 TDL Awards Committee

Texas Digital Library thanks the 2019 TDL Awards Committee, comprised of TDL members from around the state of Texas, for its efforts in selecting this year’s group of outstanding recipients.

Sean Buckner (co-chair), Digital Preservation Librarian, Texas A&M University
Susan Elkins, Digital Resources Librarian, Sam Houston State University
Lauren Goodley, Archivist, Texas State University
Nerissa Lindsey, Cataloging Librarian, Texas A&M International University
Joseph Pruett, Digital Repository Librarian, Angelo State University
Adrian Shapiro, Digital Projects Librarian, Texas Woman’s University
Chris Starcher, Digital Systems Librarian, Texas Tech University
Jessica Trelogan, Data Management Coordinator, University of Texas at Austin
Emily Vinson, AV Archivist, University of Houston
Sean Visintainer (chair), Head of Special Collections, Cal State – San Marcos (formerly of UT Rio Grande Valley)
Annie Wu, Head of Metadata and Digitization Services, University of Houston

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.

The Dallas Way

http://www.thedallasway.org/

Instagram @thedallasway

Facebook @TheDallasWay

The Inside Books Project

https://insidebooksproject.org/

Twitter @InsideBooksATX

Facebook @insidebooksproject

Texas A&M University Libraries

https://library.tamu.edu/

Twitter @tamulibraries

Facebook @tamulibraries

Texas After Violence Project

https://texasafterviolence.org/

Twitter @txafterviolence

Facebook @TexasAfterViolenceProject

Texas Digital Library

www.tdl.org

Twitter @TXDigLibrary

Facebook @texasdigitallibrary

3Dhotbed

https://www.3dhotbed.info/

Instagram @3dhotbed

Twitter @3Dhotbed

University of California – Los Angeles

https://www.library.ucla.edu/

Twitter @UCLA_Library

Facebook @uclalibrary

University of Houston Libraries

http://libraries.uh.edu/

Twitter @UHoustonLib

Facebook @uhlibraries

University of North Texas

https://library.unt.edu/

Twitter @UNT_Libraries

Facebook @unt.libraries

University of Texas at San Antonio Libraries

https://lib.utsa.edu/

Twitter @utsalibraries

Facebook @utsalibraries

2018 TDL Award Winners

Excellence in Digital Libraries Award

Project Team: Black Gospel Music Restoration Project, Baylor University

(left to right) Billie Peterson-Lugo, Kara Long, Tim Logan, Darryl Stuhr, and Eric Ames of Baylor Libraries Photo credit: Kira Matica kiramatica.com

Baylor Libraries Project Team Members:
Eric Ames, Assistant Director, Marketing and Communications
Stephen Bolech, Audiovisual Digitization Specialist
Kara Long, Metadata Librarian
Darryl Stuhr, Associate Director for Digital Projects
Travis Taylor, Digitization Assistant

The Black Gospel Music Restoration Project team at Baylor Libraries are being honored with the 2018 Excellence in Digital Libraries Award for their work in making accessible the creative output of hundreds of black gospel artists. The initiative is in its 11^th year and has to date digitized and providing access to more than 2000 unique digital items in multiple formats, including more than 4400 songs, and posters and photographs. This is the only national project documenting the “Golden Age” of black gospel music (1945-1975), and it is used in research about musical styles, lyrical analysis, and performance practice, as well as being featured in the National Museum of African American History and Culture. The collection lends itself to awesome outreach opportunities, like concerts, art exhibits, and inclusion in symposia. Most notably, the libraries have produced 2-minute radio segments currently being broadcast on NPR affiliates, which can be found here.

Trailblazer Award

Winner: Bobby Marlin and the Keiller Drawings project at the Moody Medical Library of the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston

The Keiller Drawings Digitization project, and Bobby Marlin, archivist at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, are selected for this year’s Trailblazer Award because of the immense coordination, project management, and staff collaboration required to make completely accessible over 2500 rare anatomical drawings produced from illustrations in anatomy textbooks, microscope slides, cadavers, and surgeries. These renderings give valuable insights into pedagogy surrounding anatomy in early Texas medical schools. The project required initial sorting, transport, metadata creation, file naming authorities, hiring a photographer, and determination of efficiencies to stay on budget. All in all, the photographed drawings were identified, photographed, and uploaded with description in a few months, and served as a demonstration project that led to Texas State Library and Archives Commission funding for future projects.

Innovative Outreach Award

Winner: Jessica Trelogan, for her work on Texas Data Repository outreach

Jessica Trelogan of UT Libraries Photo credit: Kira Matica kiramatica.com

Numerous are the ways in which Jessica Trelogan has promoted and marketed the Texas Data Repository for UT Austin. The service itself began in early 2017, and so did Jessica’s promotions. After presenting on the repository at on-campus conferences, she used Open Access Week to distribute mugs to everyone who uploaded content. She also initiated “Cake-for-Data” – the first four people to deposit their data to the Texas Data Repository received a real cake (!!) with the repository logo, name of their ‘dataverse,’ and the DOI for their dataset printed on the top. This took off on Twitter. Carrying on the delectable food theme, Jessica also started a popular workshop series called “Data & Donuts” that includes sessions on managing, publishing, storing, and sharing research data. Jessica has received praise from across campus on her ambassadorship and expertise, from professors, students, IT administrators, and archivists alike.

Graduate Student Excellence Award in Digital Libraries

Winner: Alicia Niwagaba, for her work on the Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America

Alicia Niwagaba, Graduate Research Assistant for Archives of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America Photo credit: Kira Matica kiramatica.com

Alicia Niwagaba is a recent graduate in the University of Texas at Austin School of Information and serves as a team member for the National Science Foundation grant-funded “Archives of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America” (AILLA) project. As a member of the project team, she has been working on curriculum for language documentation researchers that will help them deposit their work in digital repositories and has been helping to write a research paper on the curatorial instruction. Alicia produced and captioned high-quality videos using various packages to support the instruction. (https://youtu.be/jXf3tHRXZ1g and https://youtu.be/c-Mcp5ozgx0) Alicia is also working on Spanish-language voiceover tracks for them. Her team members say Alicia has improved the level of service of the AILLA project.

TDL Service Award

This year’s TDL Service Award recipient is Ryan Steans.

In October 2017, Ryan left Texas Digital Library after nine years of service. He is now the Community Manager of Avalon, an open source system for managing and providing access to large collections of digital audio and video and developed by the libraries of Indiana University Bloomington and Northwestern University.

All who worked with Ryan during his tenure at Texas Digital Library know the immense value that he brought to the consortium. He joined Texas Digital Library in 2008 and held several positions over the years, including Assistant Director starting in 2015. During his time at Texas Digital Library, he transformed the IT organization into a service-oriented team focused on member needs, built strong relationships with staff and faculty at member institutions, and represented the consortium internationally at conferences and on committees.

Additionally, Ryan managed Texas Digital Library through several leadership transitions, and, in his most recent roles overseeing technology and operations, he led the technology implementation of several new services, including the launch of the Texas Data Repository and new digital preservation storage options.

Ryan’s steadiness, practicality, and constant attention to the needs of members helped Texas Digital Library grow and thrive, and he leaves both TDL and the larger Texas library community better than when he found it.

The Texas Digital Library thanks the 2018 TDL Awards Committee for its efforts in selecting this year’s group of outstanding recipients:

Sian Brannon (Chair), University of North Texas
Sean Visintainer (Vice-Chair), University of Texas Rio Grande Valley
Kris Helge, Texas Woman’s University
Jonathan Helmke, Stephen F. Austin State University
Derek Reece, University of Texas at Arlington