Oct 24, 2018 Fall Digital Library Conference Season

It has been a busy few weeks for folks in Digital Library Services! We’ve had several conferences during the month of October. The first conference, which was fun for me to attend, was Samvera Connect. The University of Utah Marriott Library hosted this national conference, which focuses on the Samvera repository system. Attendees came from all over, with some even coming from overseas. I’ve been curious about Samvera for many years, and this conference helped me get a better sense of the variety of institutions and initiatives currently being developed with the Samvera platform. The program for Samvera Connect had plenty of presentations from people directly engaged in software development, so it was an interesting experience attending, because often I go to conferences that are a little less technical.

Samvera Connect 2018

Right after Samvera Connect, it was time to travel to Henderon, NV for the Digital Library Federation Forum. This is always my favorite conference to attend, because so many presentation are relevant to my position as Digital Initiatives Librarian and digital library work in general. The DLF Forum is also where I engage with doing national level service, ranging from the Metadata Support Group to the DLF Assessment Interest Group, Metadata Working Group. For the DLF Forum, I helped facilitate two discussion sessions, presented on a panel on metadata migration, and organized a workshop on Metadata Analysis.

After DLF it was time to come back to Utah and get ready for the CIMA Fall Caucus, where I spoke about our new Digital Exhibits program, and discussed the work the library did to support the Century of Black Mormons digital public history project. It has been a whirlwind October, but it is always great to settle back into digital library work after hearing about a variety of emerging projects from digital library colleagues across the country.