2025 Upper Midwest Digital Collections Conference and Minnesota Digital Library

Craig Stevens from Northwestern University IT and the Knight Lab will be the opening keynote speaker. He will discuss his work on augmented and virtual reality technologies that create captivating library-based experiences from university collections for visitors.

This session will discuss the logistical process of migrating 3D digital models hosted on Sketchfab to a self-hosted instance of the Smithsonian's Voyager viewer. Motivated by the recent changes taking place at Sketchfab, I will discuss the advantages and challenges of this migration process in the context of a curator with limited web hosting experience.

In 1844, a man named William Miller predicted the end of the world. When the apocalypse didn’t come, he and his devoted followers were left reeling. However, out of their great disappointment came several new American Protestant churches that still operate today. This presentation outlines a collaboration between Aurora University in Illinois and Andrews University in Michigan to digitize, preserve, and share the personal papers of William Miller and other key Adventist leaders whose writings shed light on this interesting moment in American religious history. Aurora University, a former Advent Christian school, has historically valuable but disorganized and inaccessible special collections. Andrews University, affiliated with the Seventh-day Adventist denomination, has a robust library digitization program and an open-source repository built with Samvera Hyku. Despite having no prior collaboration, this partnership benefits both universities. Aurora gains help in organizing and providing access to their collection, while Andrews gains valuable materials to share through their repository. This presentation will describe how we drafted a partnership agreement, the workflows we established to fulfill this project (including training AI-powered transcription software for handwritten documents), a timeline of our accomplishments so far, the challenges we've faced, and next steps.

This session will explore how the Norwegian American Historical Association (NAHA) expanded access to its digital collections during a transformative year of rebranding, commemoration, and collaboration. NAHA unveiled a new visual identity and website while preparing to commemorate two significant milestones: 200 years of organized Norwegian migration and the organization’s centennial.

Key projects included an NEH-funded initiative to digitize World War II materials of transatlantic significance and a partnership with the National Library of Norway to make Norgesbrev (Norway letters) more accessible. NAHA’s archivist will discuss managing these projects, utilizing AI for transcription, engaging volunteers and students, and leveraging these efforts during a capital campaign to support the archives' future.

Local history organizations often lack resources to start or continue digitization work in a sustainable manner. Students need well-organized (and paid!) opportunities to put theory into practice. Our initiative brings together Wisconsin local history organizations and information school graduate students to create new digital collections. In our session, program coordinators and participants will discuss how and why we designed this initiative, share a few success stories and lessons learned along the way, and offer ideas for structuring a similar digitization initiative within your community or organization.

Collecting data about our work can lead to new insights—especially when it's easy to explore and share. After tracking 4 years of digital archives processing activities and 10 years of file format inventories (including MDL content), we built data visualization dashboards for on-the-fly analysis. We will discuss the collaborative and iterative process of setting up our data sources and building these dashboards in Tableau, and how the interactive visualizations led to new discoveries and reporting efficiencies.

In 2024, the Illinois Digital Heritage Hub (IDHH), the Illinois Hub for the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), completed the migration of our aggregation server from a legacy system (REPOX) to an open source one created by DPLA’s Michigan Hub (Combine). In this session, the IDHH Project Coordinator will share the background and method of this project, including the successes, challenges, and lessons learned from this migration of aggregation server systems and how they can be applied to similar projects.

Northwestern University Libraries holds one of the largest collections of Environmental Impact Studies in the US.  Many of these documents are available on microfiche, and that fiche is sometimes our only version of the item in the collection. These reports are a trove of information about federal infrastructure projects, discuss the potential social and environmental effects of those projects, and often include public comments and sentiment.  

Working with our Digital Scholarship colleagues and faculty members who wish to use these items for computational study, the Digital Products and Data Curation team has modified existing digital project workflows to digitize and provide access to these reports. This project required an examination of our existing workflows, proactive conversations between the digital projects staff, librarians, and researchers, and solutions for providing the content in both human- and machine-readable outputs.

This presentation provides a detailed case study of an on-going digitization project utilizing new processes and equipment as well as an overview of how Northwestern University Libraries Digital Products and Data Curation staff are thinking about the diverse ways that digital objects can be analyzed by researchers and how those use cases affect how we digitize, preserve and provide access to our resources.

Digitization is about more than imaging. It’s about using human and machine-readable pathways and discovery systems to broaden access to the widest range of users. In the past, digitization of archival collections has focused on capturing and accessing images of hand-written material. In the current cultural heritage environment, providing access to images of archival textual material alone is not enough. Today’s archival collections need to be searchable and transcribable. This session will discuss how the University Libraries uses technology such as OCR and AI and also uses the public to explore and transcribe digitized texts. We will talk about how archives are crowdsourcing digitized transcripts with students, staff and the public.

The American Philosophical Society’ collection contains over 6.8 terabytes of digital records as of a 2019 survey, with that number growing ever presently. With the endowment of two digital archivist positions, the Society is looking into ingesting and making available this backlog and digital records that are coming with newer acquisitions. Part of this goal is to see what has already been done in regards to how institutions organize and represent born digital materials in their finding aids. This was a task that was given to me early on when I started as an Assistant Digital Archivist. This presentation aims at discussing the process and results of looking at 6 different institutions published guidelines for born-digital description. I examined the different metadata elements they recommend, their respective changes when it comes to born-digital materials, and how they could be applied to the APS’ own processing manual. I also will talk about how, as a new professional, this job and tasks affected me and how I view this job. Finally, there could be talk of my research and tests of using the complex digital object feature in ArchiveSpace to represent born-digital records that have a complex hierarchical structure, a feature that has been present in Aspace for some time but not been used by any institution to my knowledge. This talk can benefit others who work with these types of materials, and develop a conversation about how to best approach their description and representation.

Florida State University and the Sunshine State Digital Network have been working to implement inclusive description practices in our online repositories and discovery layers. Through inclusive description centered on an active, critical awareness of bias, privilege, and power and an ethos of deliberate care used in the assessment, creation, and refinement of descriptive texts we are increasing accessibility of our collections in unserved and underserved communities seeking meaningful connections with their histories. Learn about our approach and how these practices can be implemented to expand access and increase discovery of content.

If we want to use research to make meaningful change, we need to intentionally bring people into the creation of new knowledge. From our base in the University of Minnesota Libraries, Mapping Prejudice collaborates with community members to expose the history of structural racism by weaving together digital humanities tools and crowdsourcing technologies into a public history practice. We mobilize community members to identify and map racial covenants, clauses that were inserted into property deeds to keep people who were not White from buying or occupying homes. As we invite people into this process, we need to ensure we are not perpetuating harm or re-traumatizing the communities most impacted by the historical legacies we are unearthing.

To address this, we are developing an interdisciplinary crowdsourcing model, creating culturally sensitive community mapping sessions tailored to the needs of Black and Brown participants. Our team believes that the impact of data is determined by the way that it is created. For Mapping Prejudice to have a lasting impact, we are continuously refining our crowdsourcing process, ensuring our community engagement work centers the communities most impacted by the history of racial covenants and supports productive dialogue around racial inequities today. This presentation will share the ongoing learnings, challenges, questions, tips, and successes from this work.

Join Greta Bahnemann, the Minnesota Digital Library’s Metadata Librarian, as we celebrate the program’s twentieth anniversary. Session participants will learn about the beginnings of the Minnesota Digital Library and how its programs and services have evolved over the past twenty years. Greta will cover the evolution of this statewide digital collection from its inception, the growth of its contributor base, the addition of an increasing range of materials, the hiring of professional staff, and the creation of metadata standards. MDL staff will also share an overview of more recent efforts in digital storytelling, the adoption of standardized rights statements for the collection, and the development of our social media presence, as well as our ongoing relationship with the Digital Public Library of America.

The presentation will then conclude with an activity for the participants. Attendees will be invited to provide input on and ideas for the Minnesota Digital Library’s future directions via a collaborative whiteboard with sticky notes.There will also be ample time for questions.

Archives content management systems (CMS) provide integrated support for archival workflows, including arrangement and description, accessioning, access and managing records. But is a content management system right for your shop? Attendees will learn what questions to ask when evaluating current workflows to the functionality of a proposed system - all to analyze whether or not a content management system, including open-source, is right for their institution. Attendees will hear from an archives that used two open source content management systems since 2009 regarding the challenges and benefits. In addition, the session will discuss how successful – or not - a recent migration into Access to Memory (AtoM) was.

In this presentation, Indiana State Library's Digital Initiatives director Justin Clark will discuss how collections from Indiana Memory and Hoosier State Chronicles, among others, have been added to Wikimedia Commons, improving existing Wikipedia pages and expanding access to digitized images. He'll also discuss ISL's public programming to coincide with these collections, including participating and hosting Wiki Edit-a-Thons for historians and librarians. In sum, attendees will learn about Indiana Memory and Hoosier State Chronicles as digital repositories, their integration with the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), and ultimately their use on Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons, and how said initiatives can be used for public educational events.

Murphy Library at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse officially launched the Driftless River Initiative (DRI) in the spring of 2024 with the aim of utilizing digital collections in harnessing the collective informational impact of unique and rare library collections on the historical-, contemporary-, and future-research related to the Upper Mississippi River and the Driftless (unglaciated) Region of western Wisconsin. This exciting Initiative is rooted in the interdisciplinary approach to creating new knowledge through making information accessible and discoverable; preserving that information for future iterations of inquiry; and facilitating new connections between researchers, disciplines, and institutions to further enhance our knowledge and understanding of the natural environment, Wisconsin’s freshwater resources, and the mutual impact these unique geomorphic features and our presence have on each other. This compelling project is unique as it is built upon collections, some that have existed at Murphy Library for decades, that are seemingly distinct, yet all are connected through the Mississippi River and/or the unglaciated region of western Wisconsin; through employing a digital collections infrastructure, the project allows us to rethink collection building and how to enhance engagement with the materials, both digitally and physically. This presentation will discuss the circumstances leading up to launch of the DRI at Murphy Library, where the project currently stands, and what the hopes are for the project moving forward.