2025 Upper Midwest Digital Collections Conference and Minnesota Digital Library

Learn how CONTENTdm, the archival community’s landmark digital collection system, is evolving to help diverse institutions build, preserve, and showcase their digital objects with a hosted solution that maximizes discovery of your unique materials. In this interactive session participants will engage in activities and discussions focused on evaluating existing and potential digital collections workflows that leverage software like CONTENTdm and the collaborative environment of the wider special collections and cultural heritage ecosystem.

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. The session will be structured like a case study, plus room for discussion and questions. 

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.

Please note: This session is available to in-person attendees only and will not be streamed or recorded.

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.

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.