Bruce Wardlow and Patrick Diepen traveled to Austin in May to attend the Texas Conference on Digital Libraries (TCDL) hosted at the University of Texas JJ Pickle Research Center by Texas Digital Libraries. Wardlow, Open Educational Resources Librarian at Cornette Library, and Diepen, Archivist in the Special Collections and University Archives Department, presented BuffSAF, a Simple Archive Format compiler intended to streamline bulk uploads to a DSpace repository, such as our WTAMU Institutional Repository. While in use at WT, this tool has streamlined the process of digitally preserving historical copies of The Prairie, WT’s student-run newspaper, making the upload stage that used to take hours for a year’s worth of issues now take mere minutes. Their presentation showed their progress on BuffSAF and asked the audience: "What would you want this tool to do for you?" The answers they received were not only helpful, but many in the crowd have offered to help improve the program.
While at the conference, Diepen and Wardlow also attended presentations and user group meetings to learn more about projects undertaken by their peers at other institutions and to share their knowledge with fellow experts. TCDL is focused largely on the technical side of librarianship, with many sessions on archives and systems librarianship. The latest strategies for digitally imaging documents were shared, as well as briefs on updates to the software that libraries rely on. It also has an emphasis on Open Access and Open Educational Resources, and offered an opportunity for librarians around the state to share their wins and fails in implementing innovative ideas.
By Patrick Diepen and Bruce Wardlow
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