Texas Conference on Digital Libraries

Valuing Cultural Heritage Content: Findings from the Measuring Reuse Project
Santi Thompson, Liz Woolcott, Caroline Muglia, Ayla Stein, Elizabeth Kelly, Genya O'Gara
Developing a Framework for Measuring Reuse of Digital Objects, an IMLS-funded project (LG-73-17-0002-17) by the Digital Library Federation Assessment Interest Group (DLF-AIG), is conducting a needs assessment of the digital library community to determine features of a future assessment toolkit that goes beyond use and traditional library metrics, and focuses on transformation. Drawing upon data from two community surveys (with hundreds of survey responses), six focus group sessions (with over twenty participants total), and critical feedback from an active advisory board, this presentation will outline functional requirements and use cases, which will serve as the building blocks that will drive the future development of an assessment toolkit.

Exploring Indigenous Perspectives in a Digital Language Archive
J. Ryan Sullivant
Since 2000, the Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America (AILLA) at the University of Texas has grown into a large repository of media in and about 333 of the approximately 750 Indigenous languages spoken south of the US-Mexico border (Simons and Fennig, 2017). AILLA is but one example of a digital language archive whose collections are primarily audio and video media of people speaking, singing or praying in their Indigenous languages. These collections can offer a wealth of ethnographic, historical, and personal information about these people's’ lives, histories, and cultures. Beyond containing the voices of thousands of Indigenous people, digital language archives also contain collections that were collected by Indigenous people gathering recordings about their own languages and cultures. Since a collection reflects and projects an image of the people described in it, if Indigenous people make the decisions about what kinds of events to record, what questions to ask during oral history interviews, etc, then they are able to better have their perspectives represented in the archives without an additional and potentially distorting lens (Christen, 2007; Lonetree, 2012).

Poetry in the Code: Processing J. M. Coetzee’s Born-Digital Materials
Abby Adams
Before he embarked on a career as a scholar and writer, the South African-born author J. M. Coetzee was a computer programmer in the early years of the industry’s development, a subject which has been largely ignored by researchers to date. Held at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, Coetzee’s analog materials, processed in 2013, are frequently consulted by researchers. In fall of 2017, his born-digital files were made accessible. This hybrid collection represents an important use case, stretching as it does across sixty years of digital innovation, due to the profound implications it has for our understanding of Coetzee’s academic and literary career.