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.

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.

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.

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.