The Digital Library Federation (DLF) Forum took place in St. Louis, Missouri November 12-15. The conference is a yearly event that brings together cultural heritage practitioners who create, preserve, and analyze digital materials in libraries, archives, and museums.
This conference allows the opportunity to exchange ideas, and learn about new projects and developments in and across the field. For instance, Dr. Petrouchka Moïse, the CLIR postdoctoral fellow in Digital Curation for Haitian Art at Grinnell College, is tackling a huge project Haitian Art Digital Crossroads that expands access to a vast digital collection of Haitian art. Without this conference, few would expect that the largest collection of Haitian art in the world is in Iowa.
Dr. Moïse’s work aligns well with other presentations and panels of the forum which covered current trends at the forefront of the field which included critical metadata, preserving physical artifacts and their digital surrogates, and project management.
Additionally, the forum focused on expanding access and the use of materials particularly to communities beyond that of the creators with panels on community archives and crowdsourcing and minimal computing. DLF Learn featured a hands-on workshop on Collection Builder, a lightweight website builder perfect for those without funding or access to the digital infrastructure of a well resourced organization.
The welcoming environment that DLF works hard to create, makes for fruitful networking opportunities and a highly collaborative spirit. To learn more about all of the presentations visit the repository of all the slides from this year’s conference.