Digitization is one of the most requested, most expensive, and most influential programs in an archives' public service model. Archivists often find themselves juggling donor and patron expectations, ever-shrinking budgets, and our own obligation to advocate for the highest availability of our materials.
Like many institutions, Northern Kentucky University faces increasing demands for digitization of archival materials and simultaneously shrinking budgets. In this session, NKU's former head of Special Collections and University Archives and current librarian for Archives draw on their experience forming a digitization initiative with cost-efficiency and a lens for the ease of patron experience. Regardless of the size and style of your archives, you will leave the session with practical solutions for creating a digitization program with the needs of both your users and units in mind.
Topics discussed will include evaluating and utilizing equipment (new and outdated,) storage and software suggestions, digitization workflows that work for you, and our efforts to automate a process that is simultaneously deeply critical and time-intensive.
Speakers Gideon McDaniel, Dayton Metro Library (Session Chair) Michael Providenti, Northern Kentucky University
This project started with a basic idea - identify, recognize and honor the names and lives of the African American individuals and families whose work contributed to the growth and maintenance of White Hall and Madison County, Kentucky. Owned by Green Clay, the largest slaveholder in the state during his lifetime, and later by his son Cassius, known as the state’s greatest champion of emancipation, White Hall is a historic site today owned and operated by Eastern Kentucky University (EKU). By engaging students, faculty and staff from departments across EKU and partnering with the local African American community, hundreds of relevant Clay family documents were transcribed, edited and analyzed to identify enslaved individuals. The role of the archives in this project was to instruct and guide over 300 students in transcribing historical documents and to create the online database. In addition to instruction and outreach, presenters will discuss how digital tools and platforms can be used to build accessible public history resources. This work exhibits how archives can serve as a hub connecting academic programs with public history, community engagement, and digital scholarship. These partnerships expanded the archives’ reach and established it as a space for co-creation, preservation, and dialogue, rather than just for information access.
Speakers Debbie Whalen, Eastern Kentucky University (Session Chair) Jackie Couture, Eastern Kentucky University
You know that box is here, somewhere. You saw it when you were looking for a *different* collection years ago. You just can’t…find it. What you did find was a handful of unprocessed accessions and a section of your stacks space packed way beyond conservation standards. These situations are not all that uncommon throughout archival institutions. Many are constantly grappling with space constraints, dated accessioning practices, and the never-ending flow of incoming materials. Good management of space is key not only to collection storage, but in the accessioning of new, unprocessed materials. Best practices in accessioning workflows and records also go hand-in-hand with the physical management of the materials and can shape how an accessioning program operates. How do archivists or processing professionals address all three of these pinch points in a meaningful way, what/where are the gaps in the management of space? How do we end the continuous cycle of space crunches and accessioning backlogs?
This session will reflect and highlight how intellectual and physical control was regained through inventory work and led to new accessioning workflows. The University of Iowa, with remnants of a choose-your-own-adventure style of management, has a never-ending, forever-changing space management project to address a list of issues. At Iowa State University, a stack read to better understand the processing and accessioning backlog led to changes regarding retrospective accessioning legacy materials. And at the American Library Association Archives how did a 580-plus box accession go awry during the pandemic, and what was its resulting impact.
Speakers Jessica Green, Iowa State University (Session Chair) Cara Setsu Bertram, American Library Association Archives Jenna Silver, University of Iowa
Nonexistent accession records, the consequences of a “weed nothing” mindset, and a lack of collections policy are not the kinds of things library school really prepares you for. But for many solo archivists and archival workers placed in brand new or undermanaged archives, it is your responsibility to bring order to potentially decades of chaos, ready or not. This presentation aims to be an informative support group; to provide both emotional catharsis and practical recommendations from the case studies of two early-career solo archivists doing the underdiscussed work of inheriting an archival collection with little to no institutional memory or few policies to guide the process.
The presenters of this session both come from small archives, tasked with (re)building the infrastructure of their departments while also handling the reference inquiries and processing activities that keep their archives moving into the future. Presenters will share their experiences and offer their solutions to common problems faced by solo archivists and archival workers in similar situations, including building workflows and collection policies, recovering institutional histories, and taking on work that is beyond your current expertise. Contributions to this session will also be made by the registrar who was assigned to the archives previously, prior to the hiring of the archivist.
Speakers Jenna Kish, Ohio Genealogical Society (Session Chair) Autumn Muir, University of Michigan-Dearborn Hannah Zmuda, University of Michigan-Dearborn
Based on their forthcoming book chapter in Navigating Archival Backlogs: Strategies for Success, Philanthropic Studies Archivist Molly LaPorte and Digital Preservation and Digital Collections Archivist Evan Miller will expand on their work from a processing case-study at Indiana University Indianapolis’s Ruth Lilly Special Collections & Archives. The Junior Achievement (JA) Records contains approximately 38 cubic feet of unprocessed photographs, and the presenters aimed to develop an efficient processing workflow while respecting depicted individuals. The JA collection is partially processed but highly used, necessitating intervention for the backlog of accruals to expand access.
Striving to balance the minimum processing and preservation concepts of MPLP alongside the careful attention and empathetic touch of a feminist ethics of care, this session will explore both their successes and failures and provide a practical system other archivists and practitioners can use in their own institutions. From preliminary prep work and documentation gathering to digitization selection and reconciliation with born-digital assets, the presenters hope to share their thoughts along with a streamlined workflow for efficiently reviewing stagnant backlogs while keeping people front of mind.
Speakers Molly LaPorte, Indiana University Indianapolis Evan N. Miller, Indiana University Indianapolis
Renovations are both exciting and terrifying, offering an opportunity to modernize legacy practices, policies, and platforms during a moment of great change. UK Libraries Special Collections Research Center is currently preparing for a building renovation, slated to run from fall 2026 to fall 2028, and two years in interim housing.
This upcoming renovation creates many challenges, chief among them findability. How will our users find us in our interim location? How will we deliver services, including digitization, in-person research access, and instruction, spread out across multiple buildings? How will this construction work impact our current efforts to foster novel outreach? How will we secure and retrofit interim spaces for patron use, collection storage, and staff processing workspace? How might we maintain current acquisition levels and practices? Post-renovation, how will we reassemble our onsite storage? Will we even be able to find all of our collections again? Will people be able to “Find It Here” when “it” and “here” are ephemeral and constantly changing?
Join three archivists working in all aspects of the university’s special collections, from manuscripts to print collections and technical services to public services, for a series of four short presentations covering their strategies for the collection move and the continuity of services through the renovation period. The session will offer tips, tricks, and practical workflows for anyone preparing for a renovation at their institution regardless of size.
Speakers Megan Mummey, University of Kentucky Libraries (Session Chair) Colleen Barratt, University of Kentucky Libraries Sarah Coblentz, University of Kentucky Libraries
Faculty Organizing for Community Archives Support (FOCAS) is a three-year, nine-university collaborative (Mellon) grant concentrating on community-partnership-based archival work. Components of the grant support curricular and pedagogical development, along with archival development and project planning. This session brings together three perspectives of experiences within the first two years of a three-year Dominican University (DU) FOCAS grant: the community partners, the student interns, and the Dominican faculty. These experiences highlight that archival access and discoverability are not only technical goals but also relational practices built on trust and shared purpose.
You will learn about and engage with the realities related to the vulnerability of archiving and cultural heritage work from a community-advocacy/community-partner perspective. The community-partner discussion also will illuminate aspects of power, empowerment, privilege, and purpose. In turn, student interns will discuss how training in community archives work has influenced their understanding of archival ethics, care, and social responsibility. The faculty moderator will facilitate the session and offer nuances of leadership approaches that maximize community and intern engagement.
By utilizing a 360 perspective, the session offers insight into how universities can prepare emerging professionals to engage responsibly with community partners. It argues that to truly “find it here,” we must build together and create infrastructures of access, stewardship, and respect that make (community) archives discoverable, usable, and cared for over time.
Speakers Anthony W. Dunbar, Dominican University (Session Chair) Kaitlyn Griffith, Dominican University
The Columbus Metropolitan Library is the fourth-most followed public library in the country, due in part to a dynamic, educational, and at times, “unhinged” social media strategy that promotes library services and collections, while not taking the medium too seriously.
Digital Storyteller Specialist Grayson Kelly will share about the overall social media strategy CML employs, including its roughly 20 percent allocation to education and history content. This includes the library's incredibly popular “Then and Now” weekly series, which annually includes some of the library’s top-performing posts. Local History & Genealogy Librarian Grace Freeman will talk about the process to select sites, highlight collection materials and the community, and create content through this historic lens.
Kelly and Freeman will share how they have successfully highlighted library special collections, archives, and digital assets across social media platforms while engaging their community. They will also discuss how their unique areas of expertise allow them to make authentic historic content digestible to followers and to encourage future engagement with collections.
Outreach to those not in our libraries can be hard, but these strategies help bridge the (digital) divide.
This session will present practical workflows for processing and preserving new, born-digital collections of challenging proportions from ever-evolving sources to make them meaningfully accessible.
Last year, the University of Kentucky Libraries Special Collections Research Center received the offer of a donation of 4,500+ videos. They arrived in the form of the university’s primary institutional YouTube Channel. In addition to addressing a number of appraisal questions, the process of accessioning the video collection gave insights into challenges surrounding cloud migrations of this scale, Google Takeout metadata, and file format remediation.
At the University of Minnesota Libraries Archives and Special Collections, recent challenges included collections with a thousand or more optical disks and accessions of files created and stored in Google Drive. While the former was a familiar media format, the number of disks involved made previous workflows unfeasible. In the case of cloud storage, new complications arose based on file size and the number of creators or file owners involved. Both cases required new approaches and new procedures just to ingest.
Presenters will share their solutions and their problem-solving processes. Although both examples are from large academic institutions, they will present lower-cost tools, free tools, professional collaborations, and the methods and advocacy that allowed this work to be completed affordably in-house without the expense of outsourcing the work to external vendors.
Speakers Andrew McDonnell, University of Kentucky (Session Chair) Lara Friedman-Shedlov, University of Minnesota
Small institutions often find themselves faced with large collections. This session will explore many of the challenges large collections present and how institutions with limited resources and staffing respond to them. From donor negotiations and physical acquisition, through description and processing to access and use, presenters will share how they’ve handled large collections and provide practical advice for those faced with their own large collection challenges.
Laurinda Weisse from UNK will talk about two large collections of authors’ papers, focusing on donor negotiations and physical acquisition of the collections, as well as touching on ongoing processing and use of them. They will share challenges faced, particularly in navigating complex ownership issues and in physically acquiring international collections.
Benedict Chatelain from Drake will discuss four distinctive large archival collections, including the papers of Senator Tom Harkin which consist of over 800 linear feet and several terabytes. These collections each present unique challenges in restrictions, acquisition, description, and processing. He will share practical strategies for managing these challenges while promoting collection accessibility and use.
Tyson Koenig from Southeast Missouri State University will present on the history of inventory and processing work done on an extremely large collection of records from a local drainage district, with varying amounts and types of arrangement and description done in the 20 years since the collection’s acquisition. He’ll discuss his repository’s plans for transitioning to a new phase of work with the collection to move toward fuller processing.
Speakers Laurinda Weisse, University of Nebraska at Kearny (Session Chair) Benedict Chatelain, Drake University Tyson Koenig, Southeast Missouri State University
This presentation explores the critical need for responsible AI practices in managing organizational records. Kansas State University, a mid-sized public institution governed by public records laws, is addressing copyright and intellectual property concerns through a comprehensive AI policy. The policy guides AI tool use across record categories, focusing on minimizing data control loss and ensuring copyright compliance.
Developed collaboratively by librarians, records managers, and professional staff, the policy is designed to be accessible to employees unfamiliar or uncomfortable with AI. By fostering confidence in AI use, the initiative supports ethical integration into daily operations. It also outlines a process for granting exceptions to AI tool restrictions, offering a replicable framework for other institutions.
You will gain insights into: - Creative and collaborative approaches to policy development - Stretching institutional resources through thoughtful design - Building a replicable framework for responsible AI use - Strategies for preserving and accessing records in AI-enhanced environments - Leadership and people management in emerging technologies
As many organizations struggle to create AI guidelines, this presentation offers practical steps for initiating policy development and building a cohort of informed professionals.
Speakers Danielle Hall, Kansas State University (Session Chair) Ryan Leimkuehler, Kansas State University
Conducting institution-wide inventories can be a challenging adventure. The size and scope of such a project, the unexpected roadblocks, and the surprising finds are sure to keep things interesting. This session will describe how three institutions tackled these challenges, including lessons learned and tips for anyone interested in embarking on their own journey.
Come hear how staff at Wayne State University systematically inventoried its 75,000-linear-foot collection, dealing with physical challenges, staying flexible, and grappling with legacy record-keeping practices; how the University of Wisconsin-Madison is surveying over 28,000 linear feet of collections to identify shelf locations, collection size, physical condition, materials types, un-accessioned collections, and undocumented digital materials; and how the University of Minnesota has used a digital inventory to track 350 TB of digital materials across multiple collecting areas for the past 10 years. We are confident these shared processes are scalable to institutions of various sizes and hope to encourage you to dive in and see what you can find in your institution!
Speakers Stefanie Caloia, Wayne State University Elizabeth Clemens, Wayne State University Carol Kussmann, University of Minnesota Mackenzie Ryan, University of Wisconsin-Madison
This series of lightning talks highlights a selection of projects in archives around Ohio. In "Telling Akron's Black History: A Classroom Approach to Archiving," CJ Jacobs from the University of Akron will present on how students worked with archival materials from Akron’s Black community to understand the lived experiences of marginalized voices in their city. In "17 TB of Photos?! : Getting Started Processing the Digital Photography of Dan Dry," Laura Smith and Aurora Charlow from Ohio University will talk about their approach to processing a challenging digital collection, which involved making decisions to surmount issues of scope, original order, and copyright. In "Resounding Histories: Podcasting for Archival Outreach," Nick Pavlik from Bowling Green State University will present on the potential for narrative podcasting in archival outreach, reflecting on his experience producing the “Archival Encounters” podcast at Bowling Green State University that highlighted how archivists and subject experts can leverage their potential as storytellers to increase archival engagement.
Speakers Aurora Charlow, Ohio University (Session Chair) CJ Jacobs, University of Akron Nick Pavlik, Bowling Green State University Laura Smith, Ohio University
Three religious archivists share their experiences with grief and trauma in archives. Sarah Aisenbry, Sarah Lubelski and Michelle Ganz will talk about how their experiences shaped their archival practice and then open the session up for discussion. The panelists will also share a little from their recently published book A Practical Guidebook to Trauma Informed Archival Practice: Best Practices and Case Studies.
Speakers Michelle Ganz, Dominican Sisters of Peace (Session Chair) Sarah Aisenbry, Sisters of the Precious Blood Sarah Lubelski, Women Religious Archives Collaborative
Digitization is not just preservation; it is access. Digitized records enable institutions to highlight underserved collections, weave connections between disparate curatorial areas, and approach archives through a non-hierarchical, rhizomatic lens. How we accomplish this mission changes rapidly with new technological innovations and new standards. These changes are reflected in the work we produce now, but what about the work we’ve completed in the past? Over the past five years, Georgia State University's Digital Projects has critically reexamined our existing workflows and the state of digital collections to rework several key aspects of our program to increase archival accessibility. As part of this process, GSU has established new standards, completed extensive structural changes to digital collections, started revising existing metadata, optimized our digitization workflows, and utilized new AI-empowered processes to increase the productivity and searchability of our digital content.
This presentation will highlight key takeaways from our accessibility projects: what worked, what did not, what we wished we did differently and the surprising benefits that emerged as part of this process. We will discuss simple ways to increase scanning productivity, what we learned from our metadata revision process, and our AI-empowered transcription workflow.
Speakers Rachel Senese Meyers, Georgia State University (Session Chair) Abigail Martin, Georgia State University
