by Molly Huber
Quick Summary
The Minnesota Digital Library annual meeting planning committee is seeking your ideas for breakout sessions for the MDL 15th Annual Meeting, which will be held on Wednesday, May 31st, 2017 at the Continuing Education and Conference Center on the University of Minnesota’s St. Paul campus. The overall theme of this year’s conference is Diversity and Inclusion in Digital Collections and we are pleased to feature as our keynote the team behind Umbra Search African American History.
Call for Session Presenters for MDL 15th Annual Meeting
The Minnesota Digital Library annual meeting planning committee is seeking your ideas for breakout sessions for the MDL 15th Annual Meeting, which will be held on Wednesday, May 31st, 2017 at the Continuing Education and Conference Center on the University of Minnesota’s St. Paul campus.
Theme and Keynote:
The overall theme of this year’s conference is Diversity and Inclusion in Digital Collections and we are pleased to feature as our keynote the team behind Umbra Search African American History. Umbra Search is an effort to facilitate access to African American history through a website and search widget; by digitization of over 500,000 items; and through workshops and public forums hosted locally and nationally about access to culturally diverse collections. This project continues to grow under the guidance of the Givens Collection at the University of Minnesota Libraries’ Archives and Special Collections, working in partnership with the Penumbra Theater Company and a growing roster of national contributing partners.
As part of their keynote presentation, Umbra Search team members will discuss the origins and development of Umbra Search; the role of partnerships and collaboration across institutions; challenges around metadata, archival processing standards, and culturally specific content; outreach and community engagement efforts, and opportunities to align special/digital collections with educational priorities and audiences in higher and K-12 education.
Speakers include:
Cecily Marcus, Curator, Givens Collection of African American Literature, Performing Arts Archives, and Upper Midwest Literary Archives; Umbra Search Principal Investigator
Sarah Carlson, Umbra Search Project Manager
Dorothy Berry, Umbra Search Digitization and Metadata Lead
Breakout Sessions:
The planning committee is looking for session proposals in alignment with this year’s theme of Diversity and Inclusion in Digital Collections, but also on other topics, such as:
- Open Access
- Copyright and Licensing
- Using Minnesota Reflections in the K-12 Community (e.g. History Day)
- Digital Preservation
- Content Management Systems
- Use of Wikipedia
- Mapping and Geospatial Tools
- Metadata Best Practices
- Collecting Community History
- Finding Alternative Sources of Resources (Such as Time, Money, etc.)
We encourage you to submit your own session idea if you don't see it on this list.
Please send a short descriptive paragraph of your session idea and who would be involved (an informal proposal) to Molly Huber, MDL Outreach Coordinator and Chair of the Planning Committee (mollyh@umn.edu) by Friday, March 10th. We look forward to hearing from you!
More about the Minnesota Digital Library Annual Meeting
The Minnesota Digital Library (MDL) annual meeting is a one-day conference at which MDL participants, partners, and interested professionals gather to learn about the MDL, what the collaborative is currently doing, and to attend sessions on a variety of topics such as best practices (scanning, preservation, metadata), teaching approaches, sharing MDL projects, technical skills, and more. To learn more about past meetings (including past topics), visit the website: https://mndigital.org/get-involved/annual-meetings
