Last July, we started a new venture to help libraries and archives digitize their collections, making them discoverable for research in support of the Digital Humanities. We framed our business on three core principles: support Open Access collections, diversify the corpus of digitized content and do it in collaborative settings. We learned a lot this first year and are excited for what the future holds.
We met new friends across the country from Charleston to St. Louis, Deerfield Beach to Austin. We visited folks in Alabama and had a wonderful appreciation dinner in San Diego. We started a small project with a large academic library and began supporting a grant for a digitization project with an HBCU. We are also starting training programs with consortia, with our session “Past to the Future: The Intersection of Digitization, AI and the Digital Humanities,” gaining broad interest having been presented to many organizations. While all businesses wish for things to happen faster; we are excited about what we accomplished this first year, optimistic and prepared for the next.
This next year we hope to help more institutions, with a focus on those that are representing marginalized communities who can help diversify the corpus of digitized content. We realize that supporting underfunded institutions is not the ideal business model but we have a greater mission to make the digitization process more equitable. Consortium can be of great support in this endeavor as can large institutions that like to collaborate. Please reach out if we can help from creating a strategic plan to supporting grant opportunities, project and vendor management, cross institutional collaboration or training. We are here to help.
Happy Birthday Paperboy!
Image credit: Library of Congress
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